Creating Your Kitchen Garden

Trying to stay true to the earliest medieval kitchen garden, le potager (vegetable garden with deep historical tradition), is about understanding them, and not trying to re-create them.  It is about simplicity, becoming self dependent on fresh authentic food.  It is about balancing spirit and soul.  

Our kitchen gardens should be paradise, a mainstay of our everyday landscape, not a disjointed separation of space.  It should be an artistic expression of you, your passion and personality.  This can be achieved from layout through the plants that you choose to grow, from vegetables to perennials. 

There are a few main things to consider when designing your potager such as site conditions (sun angles, micro-climates), the amount of space you wish to develop, your maintenance and harvest of your kitchen garden, watering, fauna, and proximity to your kitchen as a well placed potager is an extension of your kitchen, not placed in the ‘back forty’ of your property.  Are you going to create raised gardens within your kitchen garden (preferably) and how are you going to create your welcome mat, your entry piece that tells people they are welcomed, and please enter?  his can be accomplished by a simple trellis planted with grapes or simpler yet, a gate attached to a free standing pole that is always open, mingling with a hedgerow of lavender.

Infuse art into your kitchen garden, by adding colored planting vessels or a bright blue picnic table immersed in monochromatic hues of green background such as pole beans (Phaseolus vulgaris) hops (Humulu lupulus) and hardy kiwi (Actinidia argula).  Create intrigue by developing a secret garden within your kitchen garden, a light and airy space, a place to escape the day – to – day routines.  A place enclosed by an edible wall of elderberries, with a fountain and a place to rest.

Plant plants that nourish beneficial insects such as anise hyssop (Agastache spp) coneflower (Echinacea) and bee balm (Monarda) to name a few.  Have fun, be creative and always remember never plant from the same family in the same space in successive year.