A Few Square Feet

About Michael Rich

Michael Rich was certified as a Square Foot Garden Teacher in July 2009. He has a wide range of experiences in agriculture and horticulture reaching back as far as his high school days when he was awarded the State Farmer Degree by the Alabama Future Farmer’s of America.

He ran a successful greenhouse business that supplied vegetable sets to a local feed store and he sold plants from a roadside stand and from the back of station wagon. During his senior year he was an intern at a family farm that raised 150 acres of peanuts, 60 acres of corn as well as cattle and hogs.

Over the years he raised gardens of various sizes and worked with community gardens in a number of communities.  He experimented with organic and alternative methods than the standard single row methods he learned in his youth.  When he bought his home in Waynesville, North Carolina in 2008, he decided that he would turn his backyard into a vegetable garden. Using small plot intensive methods, the summer and fall gardens were a success, but he decided that there must be a more effective and efficient way.

Back in the 1980’s, he remembered watching Mel Bartholomew on Public Television teaching the square foot gardening method. Some of those concepts came in handy when learning spacing in wide bed gardening.
He had the old Square Foot Gardening book in a box and dusted it off in Fall 2008.  He discovered there was a new version of the book and a website in January 2009 and he started studying.  He made a decision that he would experiment with Square Foot Gardening in the backyard in spring 2009.

After just a month of observation of the system at work, he was sold.  Square Foot Gardening is an efficient and effective system that does everything it says it will: produces 100% of the harvest in 1/5 the space, uses less water, takes less weeding and thinning, uses less seed, saves money in the long run, and is whole lot less work.  He began making plans to convert almost all of the garden over to SFG boxes by spring 2010.

These experiences led him to the certification process, and are the driving force behind the goals for A FEW SQUARE FEET.