Garden Friends: Michael Nolan, The Garden Rockstar and His Raised Bed Template

Because so many gardeners I know are doing inspirational gardening I wanted to introduce you to them. In 2013 I am continuing my series all about garden friends who are interesting, amazing, and have fascinating garden stories. Here’s my friend Michael Nolan, The Garden Rockstar –

Michael Nolan is thee original Garden Rock Star. He is the author of I Garden: Urban Style, Grow the Food That Fits Your Space and Schedule, and is one of my close garden writer friends. I have always called him “my brother” because we have the same twisted sense of humor and a similar mindset on gardening and life. In fact, here is an eerie fact: we even look like (see below photo). If I had a beard I would be his twin!

Michael’s passion is split between culinary and gardening and his sustainable personal blog, My Earth Garden is focused on both. Michael’s evil-master-plan is to teach the world about saving money, homesteading, and the healthy idea of doing it yourself from scratch.  This season he posted a genius idea on My Earth Garden — a square foot gardening template (see top photo).

Michael says about the template design – ” These templates for square foot gardening are simple to make out of a 1’ square of cardboard, and they make planting according to the grid method ultra-simple without having to lay out strings or boards to keep your boxes straight.”

I love the templates and June is the perfect time to start planting seeds for late fall bounty. Using his template idea makes it super-easy to square foot garden.  Below you can see that his extreme patio makeover includes a lot of awesome raised bed growing ideas.

Please go to Michael’s personal blog, My Earth Garden and his professional blog, Growing Up, to get great gardening and culinary ideas for your own garden.