Ooh yes, I've just started a rough version of square foot gardening, and it's SO much tidier and easier to control than banging the plants in every which way. I have a garden of four 1m^2 beds, the very last of which I divided nicely into squares (for the first two I followed another book's recommended layout of close-planted diagonals and irregularly-shaped patches, and the third bed is nothing but broad beans in rows). In the two beds that aren't divided into squares, the plants have tangled into each other, shaded each other, throttled each other, bolted and re-sown themselves into every little nook and cranny, and just generally been a pain in the arse.
Although you have to make sure you know the full-grown heights of your plants and the direction of the sun for square-foot gardening to work, because it works on succession planting. If, like I did, you harvest one square (in my case, radishes) that was next to a slower-growing but taller vegetable on the sunny side (kohlrabi), the taller vegetable will shade the seedlings (for me: rocket/arugula) that you want to put where the first crop was. And I made the mistake of tying up the sunniest side of the bed with things like leeks and onions that won't be ready for months. So you kind of have to really think out the logistics before planting.
What I'm enjoying about this second year in my garden is that we have so many self-sown vegetables growing outside the beds! (Courtesy of our garden becoming a wild jungle over three months in summer while we were away; fruit and vegetables were just rotting on the ground.) I leave them in, even though some of them are out of season and it's hard to avoid stepping on them, just because it's fun to see them trying to grow. There are tomato seedlings and climbing beans (ha! good luck in the middle of winter, suckers), the pumpkin that never turned into anything (which I did pull out), lettuce, coriander/cilantro, and an excellent chilli/hot pepper plant that's still yielding green chillies even though it's June and officially winter.
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Although you have to make sure you know the full-grown heights of your plants and the direction of the sun for square-foot gardening to work, because it works on succession planting. If, like I did, you harvest one square (in my case, radishes) that was next to a slower-growing but taller vegetable on the sunny side (kohlrabi), the taller vegetable will shade the seedlings (for me: rocket/arugula) that you want to put where the first crop was. And I made the mistake of tying up the sunniest side of the bed with things like leeks and onions that won't be ready for months. So you kind of have to really think out the logistics before planting.
What I'm enjoying about this second year in my garden is that we have so many self-sown vegetables growing outside the beds! (Courtesy of our garden becoming a wild jungle over three months in summer while we were away; fruit and vegetables were just rotting on the ground.) I leave them in, even though some of them are out of season and it's hard to avoid stepping on them, just because it's fun to see them trying to grow. There are tomato seedlings and climbing beans (ha! good luck in the middle of winter, suckers), the pumpkin that never turned into anything (which I did pull out), lettuce, coriander/cilantro, and an excellent chilli/hot pepper plant that's still yielding green chillies even though it's June and officially winter.