A POTAGER ?

Do you know what a Potager Garden is?

I must admit that I have always loved them, even wanted to have one myself, but never knew they actually had a name - before this week that is!

I was watching a video on YouTube from yet another young gardener who lives is Arkansas.  She is a homesteader and her and her husband have started their homestead farm and gardens from basically nothing.

I love her garden - it is beautiful and it is so productive - and I might add - HUGE!  She maintains 10,000 ft of garden, filled with fruits and vegetables, herbs and flowers...hundreds of varieties of plants producing enough food to sustain her very large young family.

So what is a Potager Garden?

It is a garden that combines fruit, vegetables, flowers and herbs in one garden designed to be as much a feast to the eye as it is to the tummy.  Potager gardens were invented in France and were considered ornamental kitchen gardens... meaning their purpose was to provide food, but they also had to be a place of beauty, to be enjoyed by the gardener and his guests.

 Potager gardens are informal, romantic, natural.  They are comparable to The English Cottage Garden, except Potager gardens are centered on vegetables and not flowers.

Potager gardens, have paths and beds, and rarely have bare earth showing,  They have as much vertical as horizontal and some have hedges and walls.  They are a myriad of shapes, colours, annual and perennial all intermingling as one.

I am quite sure that traditional vegetable gardeners, such as my Dad was - would detest them.  These gardens lack the clean lines of neatly spaced rows of a traditional garden.  Instead they appear haphazard, even wild... but they produce just as much even sometimes more food as the traditional garden can produce.


So how do I get one?

Well there's the big question that I already know the answer to!   Planning... and sweat equity!

I know what I have to do, and starting this fall as my current garden is removed - I will start building my own version of a Potager garden.

No more sleepless nights of thinking, dreaming and wishing  - the planning stage has now begun!