PROVO — Traditional row gardening wastes space, grows weeds and is inefficient, says a gardening expert who'll be teaching at Campus Education Week at Brigham Young University.

Mel Bartholomew, gardening book author and former host of a Public Broadcasting System television show on gardening, claims square-foot gardening is the better way.

A civil engineer who retired at age 42, Bartholomew, of Eden, Weber County took up gardening as a hobby. He soon discovered that "simple rows just don't make sense."

So he asked professional gardeners from Maine to California why people garden in rows. The answers all came back the same: "because that's the way we've always gardened."

So he set to work developing a different approach. The process he came up with is simple — build a 4-foot by 4-foot, 6-inch deep box, divide it into 1-foot sections using a grid, fill it with a special mix of soil, which he teaches at his classes, and budding gardeners can grow 16 different crops at the same time. (For those who don't want to build a garden box from scratch, he offers wood and vinyl kits on his Web site, www.squarefootgardening.com.)

"It goes together sort of like an Erector Set," he said.

He teaches how to rotate crops as they mature and keep them growing throughout the year (except during Utah's winters.) His techniques allow gardeners to start their gardens earlier, keep them growing later in the season and avoid weeding.

Bartholomew has taught his methods on the Discovery Channel and Learning Channel for eight years and wrote his first book on square-foot gardening more than 25 years ago. His latest book, "All New Square Foot Gardening," discusses the latest techniques about gardening in small spaces. He has since written a lesson plan on square-foot gardening for schools and home-schoolers.

He created his first community garden in Long Island, N.Y., then went on to create many other gardens in schools in several states. He donated a square-foot garden box to every school in Utah and created a display garden at Thanksgiving Point.

He taught square-foot gardening to sister missionaries at the Missionary Training Center in Provo who were headed to foreign countries so they could teach it on their LDS Church missions. He has since donated to the LDS Church the rights to his books and videos, which have been translated into several languages.

As part of his humanitarian efforts Bartholomew started the non-profit Square Foot Gardening Foundation to spread his methods around the world. In some countries it's called Square Meter Gardening, he said.

Bartholomew's classes begin Tuesday, Aug. 21, with an introduction to the basics. Wednesday he discusses how to prepare the soil, Thursday he covers gardening for all seasons and Friday he ends with gardening for all people, including table gardens for the elderly and handicapped.

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E-mail: rodger@desnews.com