Gardening

Most of the sources I'd found on the subject seemed very cultish ("You have to do everything exactly my way or else you're wrong!"), which was also what I found when I looked into the square foot gardening method.

I find this very off-putting, so I rejected both and simply continued using what has worked for me in my raised beds and so far I've been happy with it.

For me, that means adding some compost to the beds each year after scraping off any mulch from the previous year that hasn't started breaking down into soil. After adding the compost (usually just a bag of black cow and a bag of mushroom compost per 4x4 bed) I turn everything over and break it up well with a spade shovel, smooth it out, plant, and re-mulch.

I'm only doing 4 beds and a few containers, so I use starts instead of seeds. As such, I fertilize each one at planting by adding granular fertilizer, bone meal, and crab & lobster meal to the bottom of the planting hole, stir it in with the dirt, and plant over that.