- Make 4x4 foot square raised beds, 6 inches foot tall.
- Dig up 6 inches of soil and make your own 6 inches by mixing at least five different brands of compost together. Multiple brands because one brand is likely made from one base waste ingredient. Ground up rice hulls for instance.
- Mix composts and soil which he has an easy method for using a tarp and pulling multiple times in different directions. Tarp needs to be bigger than just big enough to hold the soil mix.
- Fill beds with your new improved soil/compost mix.
- Divide into 16 - 1 foot squares using wood strips attached to the top of bed walls. Three strips in each direction, criss crossing to make a grid.
- Start planting and keep in mind, for small plants, you can further subdivide the grid, though not with more wood strips. Just measurements or even eyeballing.
That 1 foot square can be halved in each direction giving you four 6 inch squares. divided by three gives you nine 4 inch squares. Divided by 4 gives you sixteen 3 inch squares. Radishes, if you like them fairly small, could be spaced 2 inches within that one foot square.(25 squares) A tomato plant would take the whole one foot square as would a pepper plant. It's all a grid and further dividing the grid for smaller items. The image above has one plant per one foot square but the book talks about subdividing.
You can have the four squares on the North side for four mater plants, then grow shorter things in front of them in further subdivided grids and so on. That way everything gets good sun. Radishes up front, lettuce behind that, something a little taller behind(marigolds?) that and maters in the back. The top image does do that to some degree.
You would want to check companion planting guides when deciding what to plants next to each other. Hence the maters in the back and marigolds in front of them. Basil would be another good one to go with maters. Check companion planting guide(s) to make sure you don't have enemies right up against each other.
In his followup book, he doesn't use any yard soil and only does 6 inch deep beds. He says that's deep enough even for the bigger plants like tomatoes and peppers. You could do a happy medium like 9 inch deep beds using 2x6 boards. Then maybe use 3 inches of soil to 6 inches of made compost.
They don't have to be 4x4 feet to use the system as you can see by the images for Square Foot Gardening; https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Square+Foot+Gardening&iax=images&ia=images
Shouldn't use treated wood and untreated is only going to last a few years. That's a downside. You could brush boiled linseed oil on them or char just what's going to touch the ground. I've thought about making molds to make concrete side for beds. I wasn't thinking about the dividing strips at the time though. Guess you could mold recesses to just set the strips in. Once it's planted, you now longer need the strips. They look neat and tidy with the strips though.
Now you don't even need the books.
In my mind, raised beds shouldn't be sunk in and should be totally above ground for drainage. If I dig a post hole where I live and it's the rainy season, the hole fills with water which stays there for weeks even without more rain. Same with the above half in, half out raised beds or even a garden. You till up the soil 6 inches deep. Water gets in real easy now but how does it get out? All around the tilled area is hard un-tilled soil. You dug a pool basically and it's filled with loose dirt but water can't go sideways in clay so the soil stays saturated.