What is Square Foot Gardening?

This growing season, I'm diving into something new, Square Foot Gardening! This space-efficient gardening method allows you to divide your garden into 1-foot sections and plant several complimentary plants together, hopefully yielding bountiful harvests!

A person tends to a raised garden bed, planting various seedlings and small plants. The bed has a metal frame for support, and seed packets are scattered around. The scene is outdoors with sunlight illuminating the area.

I will start this post by saying, I am not a professional gardener or horticulturist. I am a hobby gardener that has a few years of trial and error under my belt. It's truly just something I enjoy and enjoy sharing with the world as I learn.

Each year I like to try something new, to see what methods of gardening I enjoy most. In previous years I've had success with container gardening, complimentary flowers and succulents in pots, and a lot of success with herb gardening!

This year, I decided I would try out the square foot gardening method! Square foot gardening allows you to maximize your small gardening space by growing plants and crops close together focusing on which plants compliment each other or may help deter pests and disease. Focusing on planting an optimal amount of plants per square foot, in theory, should provide bountiful harvests all season long.

Watch the video I put together about my planning my square foot garden this year!

My garden is located in zone 8b; and this year, in my 4 x 8 foot and two 4 x 2 foot raised garden beds, I'll be growing:

Tomatoes
Zucchinis
Squash
Sweet Peppers
Carrots
Onions
Lettuce
Spinach
Arugula
Radishes
Garden Beans
Cucumbers
Garlic
Basil, Parsley, Chives, Dill, and Cilantro
Borage
Marigolds
Nasturtium
Chamomile
Along with even more plants and herbs on my patio. Things like serranos, banana peppers, oregano, sage, and rosemary, and a full bucket of different types of mint! (My favorite in the summertime!)

Illustrated garden layout with vegetables and flowers in a grid. Includes tomatoes, squash, bell peppers, garlic, onions, carrots, herbs, and various flowers, each in separate squares. Companion planting symbols indicate plant compatibility.

Illustrated vertical list showing companion planting: 4 chives with 1 cucumber, 16 radishes with 1 cucumber, nasturtiums with 4 beans, and dill with 4 beans, on a brown background.

Illustrated grid of vegetables and flowers. Top to bottom, left to right: cucumber, chives (4x), cucumber, poppy (2x), yellow beans (4x), blue flower, yellow beans (4x), and dill.

What App I Used to Plan My Raised Garden Beds

Something I found most helpful in planning out my garden beds was the Planter App! (Not sponsored, just really loved this app!)

This app is jam packed with plant info and gardening functionality! You can drag and drop your plants into the layout of your garden bed and it will show you which plants are complimentary to one another and which are combative.

A grid with illustrated vegetables and a fruit: a large red tomato, a small yellow squash, a green bell pepper, and a red ring. The background is brown with white grid lines.

Illustration of a garden plan with a marigold and a green bell pepper. They are placed in adjacent grid sections on brown soil, indicating companion planting.

Each plant has an full info sheet providing a plant summary, quick plant highlights, and a growing calendar. I loved having this as I started my seeds indoors over these past few months!

Gardening app interface displaying quick info: spacing, depth, sun, water, season, frost, height, germination, sprout to harvest, soil pH. Below, a growing calendar with color-coded periods for starting inside, transplanting, and sowing outside.

Another feature I loved, which is imperative for square foot gardening, was the ability to see how many plants should be planted per square foot for proper spacing. (You can get this information from the back of a seed package, yes. But knowing all of this really helped me create a solid shopping list for my seed haul!)

Illustration of a companion planting grid with various plants: pepper, marigold, mint, zucchini, borage, onion, spinach, lettuce, tomato, garlic, and carrot, each marked with quantity labels and arranged in a garden bed.

Watch the full video I did on using the app on my Instagram!

When it came time to plant, I placed my tomato cages for my squash, zucchini, and heirloom tomatoes and planted everything around those!

Two raised garden beds with young plants are connected by a metal arch in a backyard. A wooden fence and residential houses are in the background, and the sky is partly cloudy.

I got my raised garden beds from the TikTok shop but you can find similar ones on Amazon! Here's a great pick for the large 4 x 8 ft bed and another great pick for the smaller, 2 x 4 ft beds.

This was such a fun project, with the help of a great tool, and I'm excited to see how my garden takes off this year!

I hope you enjoyed this post and learned a little something about Square Foot Gardening! I encourage you to leave a comment! (That is so helpful for my site!) If you try this out yourself, I'd love to hear about your experience! Snap a photo and tag me on Instagram (@atoastedcrumb) so I can repost it to stories!