Gardening guru Mel Bartholomew reaps global harvest

Mel Bartholomew is the author of “Square Foot Gardening,” from Rodale Press (1981 and updated in 2006) that sold two-million copies thus far, making it one of the bestselling garden books in America. Its success led Bartholomew to create the nonprofit Square Foot Gardening Foundation with humanitarian projects all over the globe. Its mission: Solve world hunger by using the “teach a man to fish” theory. Participants actually teach mothers and children how to feed themselves using the SFG method.

Bartholomew has been included in Who’s Who twice — once for his engineering career and recently for his horticultural and humanitarian accomplishments. A civil engineer and graduate of Georgia Tech, he built a consulting engineering firm specializing in site and utility design. When he retired at age 42, he took up gardening as a hobby. As the saying goes, the rest is history …