Square Foot gardening helped with idea for Great Grandparents (flowers, lawn, growing)

[MsBLChew]

With my grandparents living now in an elderly community they seem to be doing all right, but grandma is missing a part of her life on the farm. Although we felt it was time for her to let go of gardening because it was to hard on her body.
Then the hanging upside down tomatoes came into play and the square foot gardening started to get noticed. This brought us to the answer of lifting a whole a square foot gardening to table height...thus allowing her and grandpa the ability to be farmers at their little apartment. The apartment complex even gave room to this because of all those elderly people it fed. I wish I had my cam working I would post it.

[Okiegirlfriend]

Hey, it works for me. My mom was still growing tomatoes when she was 90.

[Gerania]

That is the coolist thing...really, it brought tears to my eyes. I've been a gardener since the age of 12 when the family moved into a house with a yard. Dad's family had always kept a garden and chickens when he was a boy; he was so happy to introduce me to the joys (and the disappointing parts) of growing your own food.

Not long ago I visited a Veteran's nursing home on a day when a group from the Lutheran church visited and planted the beds around the building, and a few pots, mostly with flowers but included some tomato plants so that the guys would have something to care for as well as something to harvest.

There's nothing more satisfying at the end of the day than a little bit of persistent dirt under your fingernails.

[kygman]

Ms, I've mentioned in a couple other threads something else you might want to try. Go to some farm supply or garden center and get a half or whole whiskey barrel. You can plant quite a bit of variety in it. As far as working with the plants, most of the half barrels are high enough that your grandparents could weed the garden from a lawn chair. I bet they are happy!

[greensq]

May You never get to old to play in the dirt!

[hotzcatz]

Stacked concrete blocks work pretty well for gardens. You can line them with plastic on the insides and weed mat across the bottom to save water and keep the weeds out. I like to fill the holes in the concrete blocks with soil and rebar. The walls are vertical so folks can garden from a wheelchair if they want. With a short hose at the end of the garden, watering can also be done from a wheelchair, too.

If you're building one for a wheeled gardener, have them out where you're building the garden so it can be made to fit their reach. Bring it up to a comfortable level for them and make it as deep as they can reach in from either side. A garden like this can be amazingly productive and even help lower food bills so it can be a comfort to more than the gardener.



We're using the same sort of garden construction, but for us it's sort of being used to terrace a hillside so only one side can be accessed via wheelchair. Built on a flat spot, it would be accessible from both sides.

It's stacked blocks, screened top soil from the yard for most of it, soil and rebar in the holes of the blocks. There's weed mat across the bottom, and the top foot of soil is amended with your choice of fertilizer and amendments. We use bunny manure and crushed oyster shell.



There it's finished and seeded and fenced on three sides to keep out chickens, you may not have a chicken problem in your location, though.



Three and a half weeks later, it has been weeded for the first time. Had the soil been sterile soil bought from a store, it probably wouldn't have had any grasses and weeds in it. Or, if I would have let the weeds and grasses grow and then either tilled them under or pulled them out, then I'd not have to pick them out from among the lettuces. But, it's easy enough to pick out tiny weeds when they are this easy to reach.