Plant a potager
It's as easy as one, two, three
Grow your own vegetables - however small your garden is!
Potager is really a posh french name for vegetable gardens which combine productivity and aesthetic appeal. Over 400 years ago French peasants began creating tiny, beautiful flowers and herbs with vegetables, all planted in geometric patterns. They combined beauty with utility. Plants chosen for their functionality as well as their colour and form, often trained upwards to give a third dimension to the design.
Is size important?
Potagers can be like the Potager Du Roy in Versailles - originally 21 acres!
Or just a metre square to provide you with salad leaves and herbs, if well planned and designed and with very little maintenance. You could even use a window box.
Where do you start?
Firstly choose your site.
Ideally you want a sunny site, not under trees, with some protection from wind, although this can be created by growing a hedge. For convenience and ease of use you should site it as close to the house as possible to encourage the cook of the family to go out and snip fresh produce for the day's meal.
Don't forget it will need to be watered so placing it near a tap, or at the least near a water butt, is also helpful.
Remember this is meant to be an attractive feature so put it somewhere where it can be seen.
Think about Design
Be realistic about how big a Potager you can manage. There is no question that there is work involved, but it is rewarding work that brings wonderful results that you can eat as well as look at.
Raised beds can make your life a lot easier for a variety of reasons. The raised height makes the beds much easier to work on, less bending down and you can make the soil suitable for growing a variety of vegetables. i.e. carrots and parsnips have long roots and need light sandy soil without stones, asparagus need well-drained gritty soil, blueberries need lime free soil and so on. You can easily correct your own soil if it is not up to scratch.
Shapes
Make the beds, raised or otherwise, whatever shape you like from triangular, curved, tear drop. But make them a size where you can comfortably reach to the centre to avoid compacting the soil by walking on it.
Raised beds can look good if you edge them - try hurdles or a low hedge, or some low woven willow fencing.
I am
not a great supporter of hedges for a small potager as they can take up a lot of precious growing room. They can also be awkward to reach over to work the soil of the growing plants.
A neat box hedge in a garden like the late Rosemary Verey's wonderful potager at Barnsley House may look good, but was not very practical and required extra work.
If you want an edge why not make it productive and use step-over fruit trees, or a hedge of rosemary or parsley.
Choose your vegetables carefully
Think about which vegetables you like to eat now and in what proportion. No point growing loads of sprouts if no one in the family likes them.
Local availability can affect your choice, why grow something you can buy cheaply, locally. Try something unusual that is hard to come by or very expensive to buy such as the delicous and quirky Pink Fir Apple potatoes.
Impress your dinner guests with home grown vegetables you can't buy in the shops. Why not try borlotti beans or tiny baby white or yellow carrots, edible flowers such as black velvet nasturtiums.
If you do grow too many think about freezing them or turning them into glorious chutneys. But don't fill your beds with row upon row of runner beans if you won't be able to eat them all.
Be organic wherever possible
I like to garden as organically as possible, especially in the kitchen garden. In order to do this you will need to rotate your crops to give the beds a rest from the more hungry crops and put back in the nutrients for other crops.
Try companion planting - by planting different varieties, flowers and plants close to each other to discourage pests such as the flea beetle in May and June.
If you can use your own compost, all the better. If you don't have room for a compost bin, dig small trenches in the winter months and empty your kitchen food waste bin into the trench, covering it up each time with a pile of soil. The waste will soon break down and will feed your vegetables in the Spring.
Presentation is important
If you are not the cook in the household try to make your home-grown produce look appealing.
Don't bring in those mucky potatoes or grimy leeks without first rinsing under a tap - then present them attractively in a basket to tempt the chef into using them in some delicious dishes!
Start with something easy
Unless you are already an experienced gardener it's probably worth staring with something a bit easy before planting something a bit harder to grow.
Try starting with salad leaves, then moving on to brightly coloured beetroots and then some quirky potatoes.
Get others outside and involved, they'll reap the benefits later. Get children, or grandchildren to help out - it'll encourage them to try tasting different vegetables.
Happy growing!