Hi mddorogi;

Congratulation on 8 years of Square Foot Gardening!

As for your questions, here are my 2 cents:

1) "composted leaves" are not manure compost, they are more of a mulch. You can use it to replace "some" of peat mose. But from my experience & experiments leaf mulch is not sufficient to grow more then one or two rotations of any crop and the they will be sickly & prone to disease. Plus pure leaf mulch is not a balanced nutrient source. So you can combine some of it but you will still need to balance it all out with other manure compost & vermiculite.

As for trimming around the beds, well I have two thoughts. First, you have older children now, so the chore of trimming can go to them. LOL Or, You could trim the beds with a lip of wood or stone so you can push the grass edge out and just run the mover around it. And finally a weed wacker is not that hard to use.

"Paper/cardboard" vs "landscape fabric" are the same but different. Both can be used effectively to smother the grass & weeds under a new bed. The paper/card board breakdown within 2 years and becomes part of soil. The fabric remains and will keep weed/grass from penetrating your bed; at least for a while (4 years), I have found that even this stuff breaks down in a way, since your digging might damage it. I prefer paper/cardboard because I want my plants to have access to the soil under my bed, and want the native soil to slowly mix with my bed soil.
Yes I have weeds & grass invading my beds all the time, but in the winter I cover them with plastic so they can kill a lot of the weeds that might come up when the bed lays fallow in the winter.

If you choose to use rows in a SFG, you are no longer SFG, you are gardening in raised beds. It seems that you are more concerned about not being able to reach one of the rows because the tall plants hinder access. I tend to access these squares from the side not through the trellis. Another solution I is putting the trellis in one square and plant shade tolerant crops behind the trellis (i.e. lettuce, spinach, etc).

On the upside I have 4x4, 3x3, & 2x8 beds the all do fine. The fact still remains you need to water the beds and edges do dry out more then the center of the bed. You said you have clay soil under your beds, why don't you mix some of your native soil into your bed, that will improve water retention. And your idea of sinking the bed in the soil will keeps water from running out of the bed, mine a counter sunk about 1/2 to 3/4 of an inch.

As for your garlic issue, I bury my garlic bulbs deeper along the edge of the bed, this seems to work for me.

Best of luck referbishing your beds, my advice is don't be too radical in changing things. Remember if it ain't broken don't fix it.

~CloneZero

Here is a link that might be useful: Pantry Gardener

Thanks much for the input CloneZero.

I'll check on the City compost. It's actually leaves, grass, and even food waste from the local University, I guess. One of my neighbors made a whole garden out of the stuff two years ago and their vegetables have done great, but as you point out, that may not hold up for too much longer.

Regarding grass around the edges, another idea is to just spray (carefully) roundup over a few inch band around the bed. That's a little much though; a brick border would be nice. I do have a weedeater, but I don't like using it, too much noise and smoke.

I'll probably build new beds out of plain old pine. I used cedar in the long ago past, and they were worn out after 8 years or so, partly because it's hard to get good cedar boards. After that experience, I built my current 8 yr old beds using fiber-cement siding material which you can buy in 4X8 sheets. I cut it into 12" deep lengths and made the sides out of it; they are held together with 2X4 banding around the outside.

After these 8 years, though, the fiber cement siding is flaking apart due to moisture penetration and freeze/thaw cycles, as well as the errant shovel hit or two.

It was a good experiment though!

Clone Zero: "If you choose to use rows in a SFG, you are no longer SFG, you are gardening in raised beds."

An excelllent point!;)

I guess I'm missing something. If I have a 4X8 raised bed full of garlic and plant them according to the spacings used in SFG, I look down the bed and see...rows. The thing that counts is the spacing and how intensive you are using the space, it seems to me, whether there are rows or not.

On that subject, why is the visual grid that Mel advises so important? I usually just lay my trusty yardstick down when it's time to plant. Seems like a grid would just get in the way. I guess I should read more about it, I must be missing the point.

Mark

The reason it's so important is that if you don't use a grid, you start to do what you are doing-planting in rows! We try to stay away from that in the SFG system. When you have a garden with a grid on it, you will not be able to plant in rows, but rather, in squares. It also sets your garden apart from the typical garden. Like Mel says, "a SFG without a grid is nothing more than a grow-box."

I didn't like the grid in-place myself, but I do scratch one into the dirt when I'm getting ready to plant just to have the visual reference when plugging in the seeds to make sure I'm hitting the recommended spacing density.

Whether a bed is 3' or 4' wide is personal preference, and nothing says they have to be squares; my beds are 4x14, 4x16, 3x8, 10x4, and 12x3.

The only bed I'm not using a grid on (or the traditional SFG method) is my corn bed. I like the idea of 8 inch rows rather than 4 per SF. It gives me a few more stalks of corn and it should help me access the stalks to harvest a bit easier. Of course it's all an experiment.

Here is a link that might be useful: Sinfonian's garden adventure

Like Ray, I scratch lines into the dirt too. This is my third year to have my first two boxes and that is what worked for me. Just had four more 3x8's built and I plan to grow corn as an experiment. Gardening is really just one giant experiment from year to year, isn't it? By the way, the man at the hardware store calls this "block gardening." I'd never heard that before. You know, before long, someone is going to invent a type of material that is laid out in square feet and can be easily cut to any dimension,like fabric, then laid on top of your soil. You heard it here first. ;)

mddorogi:
I had 8x4 beds and found it difficult to reach into the middle because one side of my bed had a florida weave with tomatoes on it and was thus inaccessible. My short little arms just couldn't reach safely in from the other side.
Now that I am in a new house, I now have 8x3 beds which are SO much more comfortable for me.
I will also be planting garlic this year and will do as clonezero suggests. Although, I don't recall having any problems the last time I planted garlic at the edge of the bed. Maybe I was just lucky that year.:>

It seems to me that in his book even Mel suggested making beds only 2 or 3 feet wide if that is as far as you are able to reach. He did not specify that you could no longer consider yourself a SF gardener by doing so. The dimensions of the bed don't matter, only that you plant each square foot separately.

The grass growing under the sides of my beds drives me nuts. For my newest bed I used larger lumber and buried the sides 3 in deep. I am hoping that keeps the grass from creeping in from the lawn. We'll see...

I had the same problem with garlic--only the cloves in the middle of the bed survived the winter. This fall I think I will plant my garlic in the ground. That is where they went last time and all survived.