While reading The $64 Tomato, I kept thinking, "Part of this guy's problem is that he doesn't just want his vegetable garden to provide him with vegetables; he wants it to look pretty as well." As far as I was concerned, if my tomato plants give me tomatoes, I'm happy! After reading Designing the New Kitchen Garden: An American Potager Handbook, by Jennifer R. Bartley, I now have a little more interest in the idea of a garden that looks nice as well as being tasty.
Perhaps one of the first questions you have is, "What does the word 'potager' mean?" As used in this book, the word refers to "a year-round kitchen garden whose purpose is to supply the kitchen with fresh vegetables and herbs on a daily basis." In addition:
What makes the potager different from a typical vegetable garden is not just its history, but its design: the potager is a landscape feature that does not have to be hidden in the corner of the backyard, but can be the central feature of an ornamental, all-season landscape — even in the front yard of a home in the most exclusive residential neighborhood. The potager is a source of herbs, vegetables, and flowers, but it is also a structured garden space, a design based on repetitive geometric patterns.
(Irrelevant bit of trivia: One of the surnames in my family tree is "Pottenger", a corruption of the word "potager", implying that perhaps I had an ancestor who maintained a kitchen garden for someone.)
First of all, this is a gorgeous book! There are wonderful color photos on nearly every page, and it's quite enjoyable just to flip through the book, gazing at the photos and browsing the captions.
The first chapter discusses the origins of the potager, looking at the gardens created in Medieval and Renaissance times. Chapter two continues the history lesson, examining some large old gardens in France. Chapter three moves a bit closer to home, discussing three gardens in the U.S. on a somewhat more reasonable scale. Chapter four takes a slight detour, discussing why people enjoy kitchen gardens.
All of which is fine, but we're now finished with four chapters out of eight and I still haven't really come across anything especially useful! Whenever I read books, I tend to underline bits of particularly interesting information, writing notes in the margin to agree or disagree with whatever point the author is making. (I have a friend who specifically borrows books after I've read them so that she can enjoy reading my notes in the margin.)
After reading four chapters of this book, I still hadn't underlined anything. (That's a pity, because this book has nice wide margins for writing in!)
Finally, in chapter five, "Design Principles of the Modern Potager," the author starts to provide some useful information. Make a diagram of your property. Include structures on neighbors' properties on your diagram, as they can impact your garden. If your garden can't be quite close to the kitchen, create an enjoyable walkway on the way to the garden, since you will be making the journey often. Divide your garden into modules, rather than rows. Design the garden as an outdoor room by providing some sense of enclosure. Place fragrant plants near the entrance to the garden, as that will be an invitation to guests to enter. And so forth. At this point I was underlining lots of stuff!
Chapter six, "Plant Combinations for Design and Sequence," was far less interesting to me. Discussions of contrasting heights, textures, colors, etc, just didn't spark an inspiration with me. There was some useful information in this chapter, however. For example, attempt to design your garden with crop rotation in mind. Create a design for each of the years of the rotation, so that you can ensure that you aren't planting things in the wrong place. In general, plant your perennials and your annuals in separate locations, so that you don't disturb the perennials each year while trying to plant the annuals. Etc.
Chapter seven, "Potager Designs," returned to the earlier theme of presenting examples of potagers, again emphasizing inspiration rather than information. I found more things to underline than in the first four chapters, but significantly less than in the previous two.
Finally, chapter eight, "Building and Maintaining the Edible Garden," provides quite a bit of useful information, discussing ordering seeds; the meanings of terms like hybrid, organic, heirloom, open-pollinated, annual, biennial, perennial, etc.; growing plants from seed; preparing the soil; cover crops and green manures; etc. One useful suggestion in this chapter was to order seed and plants from companies that are close to your area. The idea is that a seed company in Iowa or Missouri is more likely to be carrying varieties that grow well in Illinois than a seed company in Oregon or Florida. I don't know whether that's true, but it at least sounds like it might be true, so I'll keep that in mind.
Although this book has made me somewhat more interested in the idea of a pretty vegetable garden, I still found it rather slow-going to read through it all. The pictures and diagrams were inspiring, but I'm just not a design-oriented type of guy. I can only read so much about complementary colors, contrasting textures, etc, before my eyes glaze over (or, since I tend to read at bedtime, close). Whether I would recommend it to others depends upon how interested you think you might find such topics. However, I admit that I found it somewhat inspiring and it has me thinking along lines that I hadn't previously considered.
What I'm Currently Reading
- The Vegetable Gardener's Bible, by Edward C. Smith
Waiting in My Queue
(in no particular order)
- Lasagna Gardening: A New Layering System for Bountiful Gardens: No Digging, No Tilling, No Weeding, No Kidding!, by Patricia Lanza
- All New Square Foot Gardening: Grow More in Less Space!, by Mel Bartholomew
- Let It Rot! The Gardener's Guide to Composting, by Stu Campbell
- Keeping the Harvest: Discover the Homegrown Goodness of Putting Up Your Own Fruits, Vegetables & Herbs, by Nancy Chioffi & Gretchen Mead
- Illinois Gardener's Guide, by James A. Fizzell
- Four-Season Harvest: Organic Vegetables from Your Home Garden All Year Long, by Eliot Coleman
- Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, by Toby Hemenway
- Country Wisdom & Know-How: Everything You Need to Know to Live Off the Land, from the editors of Storey Books
Previously Reviewed
Comments