Hi. My name is Jen.

I invented Seeding Square.

Originally, I was a school teacher. One day when teaching my students how plants grow, one was certain that carrots come from the store, not the ground. It dialed me into a disconnect in the understanding of where our food comes from.

Years later, my husband and I wanted to give our kids the fun of growing vegetables - something we both enjoyed growing up. So, we all rolled up our sleeves and put in our first vegetable garden.

Our memories of youthful garden raids were epic - those crunchy carrots, crisp peas, and deliciously juicy strawberries! Turns out, the actual gardeners had been our parents. As gardening beginners, we were in for a few surprises.

Reality struck after the little green shoots popped up: it was hard to tell the weeds from the seedlings. That first garden was not the harvesting success we had dreamed of.

Next, we researched gardening approaches to optimize our space for a bigger harvest and to make weed identification easier. We discovered Square Foot Gardening, but it didn’t match the setup of our garden.

We didn’t have the raised garden beds for traditional Square Foot Gardening, and our garden plot had an unusual shape - making it impossible to install the square-foot grids required by SFG.

Instead, we applied the textbook knowledge of Square Foot Gardening to make our seed-spacing templates. Adding sidewalls removed the need for the grids altogether - as the impressions left in the soil became the grid!

Those first jigs worked so well that friends, family & neighbors asked to borrow our "magical" squares for their gardens. Then our next ah-ha moment happened…we color-coded the numerous jigs into one master template.

That color-coding made Seeding Square the perfect tool for introducing kids to gardening. They love it! (We are now in school garden programs around the world.)

It started as a homemade tool to simplify our planting process and help us get more food from our tiny garden. In the end, it worked so well that we simply had to share our creation with the world.

What an incredible journey it's been - helping people of all ages and experience levels, to grow their vegetables with success - while making it fun and easy to do.

There are so many reasons to plant a vegetable garden: the thrill of eating your home-grown harvest, exercise, and fresh air, a family hobby (or me-time), or even as a way to lighten the grocery bill.

Whatever your reason(s) may be, I hope you will join Team Seeding Square on planting day…and remember: when you get more vegetables than you know what to do with – sharing is caring.

Happy planting! ~Jen