They discovered the joy of square-foot gardening

Dozens of slim pole bean vines curl themselves around the tightly stretched netting in Angelo Querin's garden in Dixon. Already, the flowers are giving way to slender, green pods.

He has coaxed a crop of Swiss chard along for five or six years. The plants, which came from his father's garden, boast a gnarled trunk as big as a man's wrist.

Querin likes to experiment. He has gardened in old tires. He has tinkered with different soil mixes. He has overseen an organic herb-growing operation. Lately, he has used ocean-harvested salt water in the garden.

He pores through garden magazines for new ways to prune tomatoes, unusual crops to grow, ideas about compost and fertilizer. Querin is a believer in heirloom varieties and in preserving genetic diversity in food crops.

For the past three years, he has been a dedicated square-foot gardener ("All New Square Foot Gardening" by Mel Bartholomew, Cool Springs Press, $19.99, 271 pages). A row of 4-by-4-foot beds – four of them – stands alongside a star jasmine-covered fence on the property where he and girlfriend Susannah Reinhart live and garden. Ladder-like bridges connect the beds and even reach out to the nearby fence.

Eventually, Querin says, the tomatoes and beans will reach the tops and grow over the ladders to make a leafy cover over the paths and gardens.

The growing beds are divided into square-foot spaces with 1-inch strips of wood. Querin has netting stretched over conduit supports all along the backside of the beds where he grows crops of Italian pole beans he has planted every two weeks for a long harvest season. Reinhart loves to snack on raw string beans while tending the garden. There's also an eggplant called Cloud Nine as well as Chinese long white cucumbers.

He has built wooden supports around some of the square-foot spaces, giving the garden a three-dimensional look; that lets Querin grow crops vertically in the middle of the beds. Not all the square-foot spaces are planted; he likes to leave a few bare for part of the season.

Nearby trees cast too much shade on the far bed, so Querin and Reinhart planted it full of shade-loving flowers. The different types of foliage and flowers make a colorful checkerboard pattern in the bed.

Querin's soil, until this year, was just 6 inches deep. He's added a strip of wood around the bed so it's about 7 inches deep now, and he plans to raise it another inch next year.

"I've learned that with such a small amount of soil, it's really important to add compost whenever I take a crop out. You need to renew the soil."

From the looks of things, Querin has solved that problem and can look forward to a bountiful harvest from a beautiful garden.