Monthly Tips from: Square Foot Gardening

Patty Marino: Hi I'm Patty Marino the Garden Girl.

Mel Bartholomew: And I'm Mel Bartholomew from Square Foot Gardening.

Patty Marino Its December! Merry Christmas by the way

Mel Bartholomew Thank you, and happy holidays to you.

Patty Marino What do you do in your garden in December?

Mel Bartholomew Well, you will put in our winter garden, and that’s going to keep growing all winter long if you want, remember we put a heating cable in the bottom and those plants will keep growing slowly but surely, all winter long. But one thing I want everyone to do is get your Christmas presents now, find all your gardening friends and your family and get them a Christmas present. Go to Patty’s website.

Patty Marino gardengirltv.com.


Mel Bartholomew And come to squarefootgardening.com, and get the books, and the videos, and the seeds, and all kinds of things. Go around both websites and see what you can find that someone is going to like, spread the word and get other people to garden, but I want to get you excited about decorating your square foot gardening for the winter, certainly for the holidays

Patty Marino Yeah!

Mel Bartholomew around Christmas and new years, and that would be let’s start with the vertical frames. You’re standing there you have cleaned all the vines of so they look nice and neat, but they look a little bear. So why could we put a big red bowl in that?

Patty Marino Oh, absolutely!

Mel Bartholomew Next we could take a green bows, from the Christmas tree either after or before buy some extra, and put those into the netting. And they would just stay in there. And you can arrange the greens so it looks really nice. Another idea would be to go to extreme put lights on it, either just up and over or across on the netting, and because its close to the house, and extension cord it would be easy to do.

Another thing would be to turn that vertical frame or one of them will do bird feeder. And we could do that by either hanging some of the, or I could sew it with the seeds imbedded in it, on an netting, or we can make our own, we can take pine cones, and need to find this anywhere in pine trees are growing, you take them inside, right now there really tight close together, and when they get warm, they just open up like that, and then you’re going to stuff the inside, that’s where the seeds are, you're going to stuff the inside to a peanut butter, and that becomes a bird feeder.

Patty Marino Oh wow!

Mel Bartholomew And now you can hang that on your vertical frame, with the tree lights, with the pine bows, and with the red ribbon on it.

Patty Marino Neat idea, so what else can we do to decorate our.

Mel Bartholomew Well, okay that’s a vertical frames at boxes, a 4x4 boxes, some people take different kind of materials and cover those, lets say if you have an old sheet, maybe a blue sheet, or a pink sheet, you cover that, tack the sides with a staple gun and you now have a box, and if you put two big ribbons on it you would have a Christmas box there.

Patty Marino Oh my Gosh, like a little gift.

Mel Bartholomew Yeah!

Patty Marino Well now I definitely got the Christmas spirit, and I'm going to try some of those ideas that you just told us about.

Do you have the Christmas spirit out there? Well I hope you do, and I hope that you have enjoyed spending this whole year with us, you got a lot out of what you should be doing in your garden on monthly basis.

Mel Bartholomew Alright, so Happy New Year everyone! This is Mel Bartholomew wishing you a great next year in your garden.

Patty Marino Happy New Year, I'm Patty Marino, thanks so much for watching.