Four seasons in the potager - transformation of the allotment garden - Happy New Year!

When I bought my allotment in late summer of 2009, one of my goals was to create a potager, sometimes known as an herb or kitchen garden, or in German Bauerngarten, with the elements traditional to this European garden style: symmetrical form, hedging, a centerpiece, and a mixture of flowers, herbs, and vegetables.

Now, a year and a half and lots of planning, digging and planting later, the potager is pretty much how I want it to be. For final post of the year 2010 I've put together a review showing the transformation throughout the four seasons.

August 2009
Here's what the area intended for the potager looked like when we bought the garden. It was occupied mostly by a makeshift tomato shelter and several beds of wax beans, bordered by roses and currant bushes.

September-October-November 2009
We removed or transplanted almost everything, tore down the tomato house, ripped out the wooden planks serving as paths, removed some of the lawn, hoed and improved the soil by adding compost, planted lupins as green manure (which were unfortunately greatly decimated by slugs - my first introduction to our slug problem), and began planting a boxwood hedge around the perimeter.

Before winter set in, we completed the outer perimeter of boxwood and planted some bulbs and perennials.

Winter 2009
My husband climbed the trees on the edge of the garden and pruned them considerably in order to let more sunlight into the potager. It was really worth it. After that, the garden lay dormant under the occasional light blanket of snow until spring.

March 2010
Finally I could continue! The main jobs to be accomplished in the spring were to lay the stone tiles for the four paths, create a circular area in the center where the paths would meet and the centerpiece, a birdbath, would be located, fill the center with gravel and plant a circular boxwood hedge around it. And of course to begin planting in the resulting four sections of the potager. My little boxwoods had all survived the winter well.

April 2010
It turned out to be harder than I had imagined to find a birdbath I liked. On a trip to Holland to visit an old friend, I stopped by one of that country's fabulous gardening centers on the way home and finally found one.

May-June 2010
Simultaneously with completion of the paths, gravel and hedging, the bulbs and perennials planted in the fall started to bloom, and I was delighted with progress so far!

Summer-Fall 2010
In the course of the summer I planted two of the quadrants mostly with vegetables and herbs, and two with predominantly flowers in a mix of annuals and perennials. In each section we kept at least one of the heritage roses I inherited from our predecessor. I revised my original planning to accommodate for the slug problem. If you're interested in my conclusions on slugs after a summer of observation, here's a post I wrote on it. The following shots are of early and late summer, respectively.

Winter 2010
This winter I'll be spending some time planning improvements for the spring - some things were too big or too small for their locations, some areas need a different mix of blooms, the zucchinis have to go somewhere else, and I'm considering putting some kind of tarp under the gravel to keep plants from growing through. This year we've had lots of snow, but the potager has enough contours now to look nice even so.

It's been a wonderful gardening year for me.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

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):