Finally Spring Part I: Progress in the kitchen garden

After a long pause since my last post, spring is finally seriously here and I have some progress to report on. First of all, I've now completed the boxwood hedging around my kitchen garden (aka potager, Bauerngarten, formal herb garden). For more information on the design and previous steps, see here. The circular hedge in the center was still missing. To plant it, I first made a compass using strings and posts (click to enlarge):

After tracing a circle of 180 cm diameter using a crowbar fastened by a string to the post in the center, I proceeded to plant the boxwoods, this time with somewhat larger ones to the left and right of each entrance to the central circle:

As centerpiece I'd been looking for months for the perfect birdbath with no luck. I even ordered some catalogs of elegant English garden supplies, but the birdbaths were either not to my taste or exorbitantly expensive. On a recent trip to Holland, I finally found one. It's out of cast iron with a brass finish, instead of cast stone or granite as I had originally intended, but I think it will do quite nicely. I found it at what must be a contender for the world's largest gardening center, Oosterik, in Denekamp, Holland.

When I'm finished, the birdbath will go in the middle where the post is. It has a sort of kitschy fairy on it, but I like it!

While I was working, this little fellow jumped out from under one of the large boxwoods in the background, ran to the edge of a path and froze, allowing me to photograph him/her. I'm afraid it's a vole.

Now I can finally begin with planting herbs, flowers, and vegetables in each of the four sectors. First on my list is St.-John's-wort (Johanniskraut), which, in addition to having attractive yellow blossoms almost all summer long, is also a traditional indigenous medicinal herb, at least in Germany. More to follow!

Designing a traditional herb garden (aka potager garden, kitchen garden, Bauerngarten, cottage garden, etc.)

My son Martin turning the compost (left), me planting the boxwood hedge (right) (click to enlarge)












My biggest project in the new garden is to plant a geometrical herb garden, i.e. an ornamental kitchen garden. There are many terms for this type of garden, or rather there are many types of traditional gardens in various countries which possess some of the elements of what I want to do: the traditional German Bauerngarten, the French potager garden, English cottage gardens or border gardens, French formal gardens, and on a larger scale the herb gardens still to be found in Europe's monasteries, cloisters and manor houses.

In many of these traditions, there's an emphasis on combining utilitarian vegetables and herbs with the beauty of flowering plants, and the design usually involves geometrical beds arranged symmetrically and bordered in some way, and the garden usually has a centerpiece such as an urn, a sculpture, a sundial, a fountain, or a birdbath.

Here is my design (on the right) including a list of plants that I'm planning for each sector (click to enlarge any images), and also a to-scale hand sketch (on the left) of the overall layout of the garden showing the location of the herb garden:















My herb garden is rectangular, not quite square, and measures about 30 square meters (about 322 square feet). It will have three entries, all leading to a central round area.

The following features are planned.

Border: Before winter sets in for good I want to complete planting of the entire periphery with a border of low boxwood hedging (buxus sempervirens "blauer Heinz"). This is a very traditional and widespread plant for low hedges in many countries. Slugs and snails leave it alone. Luckily, I was able to use compost earth from one of our silos to give the boxwoods a good start. Click for a closeup of that bucket of rich compost. And on the right an overview of the progress made to date on the hedge.













Centerpiece: I plan to put a birdbath on a pedestal in the center of the garden. The garden colony is full of birds, especially on the edge of the forest where my garden is. Up till now I've seen starlings, wrens, European robins, magpies, blackbirds, thrushes, sparrows, chickadees, and various birds of prey. Also, my neighbor reports there are nightingales.

Paths: Bark or gravel.

Beds: There will be four symmetrical beds with different themes. In one bed there will be mostly vegetables and herbs, two beds will have color schemes (see colored gardens), and in one bed I'm planning to grow plants which are frequented by butterflies, wild bees and wasps, and other useful insects. See plan above for lists of plants in each sector.

I've made heavy use of the book mentioned in my previous post on slugs and snails in choosing plants that these creatures don't like.

Here's a video introduction to formal herb gardening.

And now to finish a couple pictures of some beautiful roses still blooming in the garden in late October (click to enlarge):