Square Foot Gardening By Mel Bartholomew

Mel Bartholomew, an Engineer Who Popularized Square Foot Gardening, Dies at 84

Mel Bartholomew in his square foot garden in Old Field on Long Island.

Credit... Roger Thurber

May 8, 2016

Mel Bartholomew, a construction engineer who turned lattice into lettuce by popularizing a gridlike framework for what he called square foot gardening, died on April 28 in San Diego. He was 84.

The cause was liver cancer, his son Stephen said.

Mr. Bartholomew turned to gardening after retiring at 42 from his engineering and construction firm — a New Jersey concern that had worked on several State University of New York campuses — and moving his family to Long Island.

There, frustrated with weeding and watering rows of vegetables in his backyard, he applied his engineering expertise to conceive a densely packed, 12-foot-by-12-foot subdivided plot. It soon captured the imagination of aspiring horticulturists, introduced a bountiful harvest of vegetables into diets around the world, and inspired a public television program and a book that sold an estimated 2.5 million copies.

Mr. Bartholomew said in 1996, "I was always taught if you can't go over a mountain, you go around it; if you can't go around it, you tunnel through it; if you can't tunnel through it, you stay and make a gold mine out of that side."

His utopian version of geoponic geometry eventually evolved into a raised, open-bottom bed with a lumber frame. The garden was made up of nine 4-foot-by-4-foot squares, each subdivided into 16 separate square-foot plots and planted with a different crop. In two months, it would produce at least 32 carrots, 12 bunches of leaf lettuce, 18 bunches of spinach, 16 radishes, 16 scallions, nine Japanese turnips, five pounds of peas, four heads of romaine lettuce, one head of cauliflower and one of broccoli.

"No one ever developed a method to adapt commercial gardening technique to the backyard," Mr. Bartholomew said.

He said of his philosophy, "I garden with a salad bowl in mind, not a wheelbarrow."

A folksy suburban seedsman once described as a "Will Rogers of raised beds," Mr. Bartholomew explained his matrix in a public television series, "Square Foot Gardening," which began in 1982 and ran for six years, and in a book by the same title, originally published in 1981 by Rodale Press (and followed by others, including a "Square Metre Gardening" book for Britons).

He said a square foot garden, growing in a mix of compost, coarse vermiculite and peat moss, required no pesticides or tools, took 20 percent of the space of a row garden and needed 10 percent of the water. It could be placed on a porch, patio, deck or roof.

He liked to say that beginners could learn the process in an hour or two but that experts, stuck in the rut of traditional row gardening, might take two weeks.

He and his sister, Althea Mott, also established the Square Foot Gardening Foundation, which started planting programs at nursing homes and schools, as well as community gardens and nutrition education classes in the United States and in other countries.

Melvin Earl Bartholomew (he legally changed his name to Mel in his 20s) was born in Kingston, N.Y., in the Hudson Valley, on Dec. 14, 1931, to Earl Bartholomew, a linen company executive, and the former Alethe Trageser. He grew up in San Gabriel, Calif., where his mother was an avid gardener.

He graduated from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1953 with a bachelor's degree in civil engineering, served in the Army as a first lieutenant, and founded his engineering construction firm, in Maplewood, N.J. Among its projects was Stony Brook University on Long Island, where he eventually settled, in Old Field, on the North Shore.

His marriage to Virginia Snyder ended in divorce. In addition to his son Stephen, he is survived by another son, Jeffrey; seven grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

Mr. Bartholomew's pilgrimage to find the perfect vegetable garden began in the early 1970s, when the instructor at a class on composting failed to show up. Instead of disbanding, he and his classmates organized a community single-row garden in a vacant lot. By midsummer, the cohort of novice gardeners had thinned out, but the weeds were thick.

Then he started to wonder: Why follow an anachronistic linear pattern derived from commercial farming that was meant to leave room for mules or tractors? Why plant so many seeds and then have to thin the plants? Why waste fertilizer and water on all that empty space between the rows when all it produced was weeds?

He concluded that 80 percent of a garden was wasted space — "space that doesn't need to be fertilized, watered or improved, but does need to be weeded."

"I've always been a tinker and a thinker," he said.