Humans have been growing food for about 12,000 years, but 50 years ago a civil engineer named Mel Bartholomew figured out a new way to do it that could eliminate a lot of tiring weeding（除草）and watering that went with it. He called it the Square Foot Garden（SFG）, and the book he wrote about it sold over
2.5million copies, becoming the best-selling gardening book of all time.
Upon his retirement in 1975, Bartholomew became interested in gardening, but the more he got into it, the more inefficient he found it to be. Gardening had long been practiced in rows, which Bartholemew found to he wasteful, and difficult to work. Using his engineering know-how, Bartholomew came up with a method of gardening that could be practiced in a tiny backyard or rooftop, and which required only 10 percent of the water of a row garden.
Bartholemew's view was that traditional gardening with its long rows in between wasted space, water, fertilizer（化肥）and work. In fact, his conclusion was that row gardens took up about 80 percent more space than needed. In order to maximize space, he began using raised beds, divided into a number of 12×12 inch squares, each square marked off with string or wood dividers. Each square was used for a specific vegetable and the plants were closely packed to make less space for weeds, which also accounted for its water and resource efficiency（效率）.
The SFG system is popular and reliable, but it has limitations. For instance, it can be expensive to set up, although using recyclable materials to build beds can help. In addition, it doesn't work well in dry climates because raised beds dry out more quickly. But whatever its limitations, SFG has gotten millions of people growing their own food who might otherwise have never known the joy of gardening.
