Garden guru sparks growth
Ligularia stenocephala has tall wands packed loosely with small, yellow flowers. Credit: AP
I never met Mel Bartholomew.
I didn’t even know he existed until four years ago, when I saw a reference to one of the books he had written about what he called Square Foot Gardening. I certainly had no idea that he had millions of disciples around the world who were practicing what he preached.
All I knew was that his book with its planting grids and spatial calculations was instantly appealing to the math nerd in me. And since no one I knew was doing it Mel’s way, trying his techniques, which seemed such basic common sense, had the added attraction of being deliciously audacious.
My wife and I had been growing vegetables and fruits for about 20 years at that point. And we certainly have had our sweet share of successes. But that’s the thing about gardening: You’re always trying to do it better.
We know enough to know we’re not pros. We try something, then we try something else. Some things we keep, some we discard. We’re still learning.
Take the compost thing. I make it, with the layers of leaves and grass and the coffee grounds and kitchen scraps and eggshells and the turning and aerating and watering. And it seems to help our plants, but it’s never the vaunted black gold it ought to be. So I keep tinkering.
We try different plants, too. Beets have been a recent big winner. Carrots, too. Our grandson likes pulling them out of the ground, the unveiling of a mystery.
More recently, we’ve been learning about companion planting — the notion that some plants help each other by being close to one another while others actually are harmful. So it was that one year we smacked our lips as we planted fennel. And feverishly ripped it out after discovering it’s a bad companion plant for pretty much everything.
Then along came Mel. An Army veteran and former civil engineer, Mel retired young and began to apply his background to backyard gardening. Planting in long rows with wide spaces in between the rows drove him nuts. It seemed to him such a waste of resources. Space, for starters. Backyard gardeners don’t have farms, after all, they have plots.
And why, he wondered, would you mix the manure and compost into all that soil where you weren’t planting, and water all those places where there were no crops? And why plant all those seeds in those long rows if you were only going to thin them out later, as per the instructions on the packets?
Through trial and error, Mel came up with the idea of dividing his garden into a grid of 1-foot squares. And he planted the seeds as close together as their thinning distance, but in all directions — north, south, east and west. So it was four Swiss chard per square, four lettuce, nine spinach, nine beets, 16 onions.
It was an economy of resources, and of labor. Yes, when plants are that close together, there’s a lot less weeding.
Mel’s way worked in all ways. We became converts.
Mel is on my mind because he died last month. He was 84. I didn’t know until then that all that experimenting he did — which led to books, TV series, training classes and a foundation — was in his own backyard in Old Field, the tiny North Shore village near Stony Brook.
So it felt a little different last weekend as I knelt in front of some newly mixed soil and began tracing Mel’s grid with my trowel. Each line was 12 inches apart. With my index finger, I dug 16 holes in each square, each filled by two or three seeds of the carrots that will come up this summer.
Mel’s book was on the backyard table, just in case, just where it was last month when we planted the spinach and lettuce and peas and kale that are coming up now. Look at them and you can see the patterns.
It’s Mel, still here.
Michael Dobie is a member of Newsday’s editorial board.
Michael Dobie is a retired member of the Newsday editorial board.
