Square Foot Garden Math

Today we solved and explained two problems related to our square foot gardens.

How many square inches are in a 9 square foot garden?

by MCS (4th Grade)

1. To find the area of a square multiply the length times the width (in a square, these numbers are the same!)
2. In one square foot, each side is 12 inches, so you would multiply 12 by 12 and get 144 square inches as the area.
3. My garden is a 9 square foot garden and to find the total area of my garden you would multiply 144 square inches by nine.

There are 1296 square inches in my 9 square foot garden!

How many square inches does each plant get in my square foot garden?

by  Hammerhead123 (5th Grade)

Step 1 you find number of inches in a square foot. 12 inches x 12 inches = 144 square inches

step 2 you divide the number 144 by the number of plants per square foot.

Plant	Plants per square foot	Square inches per plant
Tomato, strawberry, melon, cucumber.	1	144
Basil, oregano.	4	36
Beans.	9	16
Carrot, radish.	16	9

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Square Foot Gardening: Companion Planting

Welcome back to the California Homeschool Blog. We are working on STAR test practice, Blogging and preparing our Square Foot Gardens for planting.  

This picture of a Square Foot Garden was found on wordpress.

Here is a link to the Square Foot Gardening Foundation:

Today Hammerhead123, MCS and myself, WD, are making a tough descision about our garden layout.

Originally we had planned on transplanting vegetable starts into our garden in a dense layout that would give us two things: shade on the topsoil to reduce evaporation and benefits from companion planting. We have decided to start our gardens from seed, which is an added challenge in the heat of early summer.

Today, the students will decide how to change their garden layout based on this new information.

Some potential changes:

• Adding plastic over the soil to keep it evenly moist during germination.
• Covering the soil with mulch to slow evaporation during germination.
• Starting some seeds indoors.
• Changing to a "monoculture" style square foot garden so that each square foot can be managed individually.  This would mean planting radishes in their own square foot with no other veggies.
• I am excited to see what the students decide to do!

Thank you for reading The California Homeschol  Blog!!!

Check back for Square Foot Gardening posts by Hammerhead123 and MCS later this week.