What is square foot gardening? A simple, unique and versatile system that adapts to all levels of experience, physical ability, and geographical location. Grow all you want and need in only 20% of the space of a conventional row garden. Save time, water, work and money! I am following the square foot gardening method, and I'll be using it as a reference through out the blog. Square foot gardening invented by the genius Mel Bartholomew! Learn more about it in his website , Or order his very very valuable book. It may come in downloadable PDF files too, if you search. 
Here are the 10 things that make SFG different from traditional row gardening:
- Layout. Arrange your garden in squares, not rows. Lay it out in 4′x4′ planting areas. Companion plants can help each other grow bigger and tastier!
- Boxes. Build boxes to hold a new soil mix above ground. Your existing soil doesn't matter! forget about it, and just worry about the new soil called Mel's Mix.
- Aisles. Space boxes 3′ apart to form walking aisles. It makes it easier to walk and sit around the boxes, especially when your plants get really big and spill out of the boxes a little.
- Soil. Fill boxes with Mel’s special soil mix: 1/3 blended compost (please please make your own! The compost sold in Kuwait is a little shady) , 1/3 peat moss, and 1/3 coarse vermiculite (All available in True Value).
- Grid. Make a permanent square foot grid for the top of each box. A MUST!
- Care. NEVER WALK ON YOUR GROWING SOIL. This is how the soil stays so fluffy and airy for the roots stay happy. Tend your garden from the aisles.
- Select. Plant a different flower, vegetable, or herb crop in each square foot, using 1, 4, 9, or 16 plants per square foot. You might, for example, plant a single tomato in a square, but you’d plant 16 carrots in another. Using this system, you can cram a lot of garden into a small space and still get excellent yields.
- Plant. Conserve seeds. Plant only a pinch (2 or 3 seeds) per hole. Place transplants in a slight saucer-shaped depression. This means you wont waste seeds! The traditional way is to plant lots of seeds then cut off the majority and leave the strongest.
- Water. Water by hand from a bucket of sun-warmed water.
- Harvest. When you finish harvesting a square foot, add only compost and replant it with a new and different crop.
I decided how big of an area I want to use, I am placing my SFG on the roof of my house, which I made sure received at least 8 hours of full sun. I am going big and starting with lots of boxes. So after thorough planning I decided I want two 4x4 square foot boxes (which is the standard) two smaller boxes for root vegetables like carrots and potatoes, and one long box for herbs. You can download the guide I created for the carpenters here . Its not the most accurate illustration of what the boxes look like in the end, but the numbers are right.
You can change the measurements how ever you like, most importantly, you have to make sure each square is 1ft squared in size= 30 cm. Also Most vegetables require 6 inches of soil, I've decided to use around 20cm. If the boxes are placed over a garden/soil, they don't need bottoms. In my case, I have to apply bottoms since they're going to be in the roof. The bottoms are waterproof 2cm thick plywood. The plywood has to have around 0.6 cm holes drilled in each square, plus in the corners. My boxes have weird squares in the plywood because the carpenter mistook 0.6cm for huge 6cm holes, I had them fix them without problems. Potato/Carrot beds:
One of the 4x4' beds with the herb bed:
You can of course build your own boxes, and a very detailed guide is in the book. Im sure its much more fun.I don't have the skill or time, so I had the boxes done for 50KD total, 30 for the wood and 20 for the building. The work was done by Ibrahim in Classic Design Carpentry :
Don't forget, you can collect sawdust for free and use it as a carbon source in your compost! Maybe I'll paint the outsides of the boxes with the kids before the season starts, what do you think?
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Many left-wing preppers also have guns.
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Killjoy is open about the fact she owns firearms but calls it one of the least important aspects of her prepping. She lives in rural Appalachia and, as a transgender woman, says the way she’s treated has changed dramatically since Trump’s first election. For those on the left, guns are “for community and self-defense,” she said.
Left-wing preppers consistently say the biggest difference between them and their right-wing peers is the rejection of “bunker mentality” — the idea of filling a bunker with beans, rice, guns and ammo and expecting to be able to survive the apocalypse alone.
Shonkwiler gives an example of a right-wing guy with a rifle on his back, who falls down the stairs and breaks a leg. If he doesn’t have medical training and a community to help, “he’s going to die before he gets to enjoy all his freeze-dried food.”
“People are our greatest asset,” Killjoy said. When Hurricane Helene carved a path of destruction through Asheville, North Carolina in 2024, Killjoy, who used to live in the city, loaded her truck with food and generators and drove there to help.
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Inshirah Overton also subscribes to the idea of community. The attorney, who came to prepping after enduring Hurricane Irene in 2011, owns a half-acre plot of land in New Jersey where she grows food and has beehives.
She stores fruit, vegetables and honey but also gives them to friends and neighbors. “My plan is to create a community of people who have a vested interest in this garden,” she said.
At one point, Overton toyed with the idea of buying a “bug-out” property in Vermont, somewhere to escape to, but desire for community for her and her two daughters stopped her. In Vermont, “no one knows me and I’m just a random Black lady, and they’ll be like: ‘Oh, OK, right, sure. You live here? Sure. Here’s the barrel of my shotgun. Turn around.’”
This focus on community may stem in part from left-wing preppers’ growing fears around the climate crisis, predicted to usher in far-reaching ecological, social and economic breakdown. It cannot be escaped by retreating to a bunker for a few weeks.
As Trump guts weather agencies, pledges to unwind the Federal Emergency Management Administration and slashes climate funding — all while promising to unleash the fossil fuel industry — climate concerns are only coming into sharper focus.
They’re top of mind for Brekke Wagoner, the creator and host of the Sustainable Prepping YouTube channel, who lives in North Carolina with her four children. She fears increasingly deadly summer heat and the “once-in-a-lifetime” storms that keep coming. Climate change “is just undeniable,” she said.
Her prepping journey started during Trump’s first term. She was living in California and filled with fear that in the event of a big natural disaster, the federal government would simply not be there.
Her house now contains a week’s worth of water, long-term food supplies, flashlights, backup batteries and a solar generator. “My goal is for our family to have all of our needs cared for,” she said, so in an emergency, whatever help is available can go to others.
“You can have a preparedness plan that doesn’t involve a bunker and giving up on civilization,” she said.
These preppers have ‘go bags,’ guns and a fear of global disaster. They’re also left-wing
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The day after President Donald Trump was elected in 2016, Eric Shonkwiler looked at his hiking bag to figure out what supplies he had. “I began to look at that as a resource for escape, should that need to happen,” he said.
He didn’t have the terminology for it at the time, but this backpack was his “bug-out bag” — essential supplies for short-term survival. It marked the start of his journey into prepping. In his Ohio home, which he shares with his wife and a Pomeranian dog, Rosemary, he now has a six-month supply of food and water, a couple of firearms and a brood of chickens. “Resources to bridge the gap across a disaster,” he said.
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Margaret Killjoy’s entry point was a bleak warning in 2016 from a scientist friend, who told her climate change was pushing the global food system closer than ever to collapse. Killjoy started collecting food, water and generators. She bought a gun and learned how to use it. She started a prepping podcast, Live Like the World is Dying, and grew a community.
Prepping has long been dominated by those on the political right. The classic stereotype, albeit not always accurate, is of the lone wolf with a basement full of Spam, a wall full of guns, and a mind full of conspiracy theories.
Shonkwiler and Killjoy belong to a much smaller part of the subculture: They are left-wing preppers. This group is also preparing for a doom-filled future, and many also have guns, but they say their prepping emphasizes community and mutual aid over bunkers and isolationism.
In an era of barreling crises — from wars to climate change — some say prepping is becoming increasingly appealing to those on the left.
The roots of modern-day prepping in the United States go back to the 1950s, when fears of nuclear war reached a fever pitch.
The 1970s saw the emergence of the survivalist movement, which dwindled in the 1990s as it became increasingly associated with an extreme-right subculture steeped in racist ideology.
A third wave followed in the early 2000s, when the term “prepper” began to be adopted more widely, said Michael Mills, a social scientist at Anglia Ruskin University, who specializes in survivalism and doomsday prepping cultures. Numbers swelled following big disasters such as 9/11, Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the 2008 financial crisis.
A watershed moment for right-wing preppers was the election of Barack Obama in 2008, Mills said. For those on the left, it was Trump’s 2016 election.
Preppers of all political stripes are usually motivated by a “foggy cloud of fear” rather than a belief in one specific doomsday scenario playing out, Mills said. Broad anxieties tend to swirl around the possibility of economic crises, pandemics, natural disasters, war and terrorism.
“We’ve hit every one of those” since the start of this century, said Anna Maria Bounds, a sociology professor at Queens College, who has written a book about New York’s prepper subculture. These events have solidified many preppers’ fears that, in times of crisis, the government would be “overwhelmed, under-prepared and unwilling to help,” she said.
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