The Potager Garden

Potager Garden (google search photo source)

In 2004, I spent five glorious days in Paris and loved every second of it. I find any excuse possible to extol the French and now I have another reason, the potager garden.  I just finished taking a six week landscape design class though our local adult education program.  One of my goals this year and into the future is to install edible landscaping in our front and back yards.  However, I needed to know a bit more (by which I mean a LOT more) about landscape design principles before I haphazardly start replacing our existing and perfectly lovely landscaping. I certainly want to make things look better (not worse).  I really didn't know what to expect from the the course, but I came away with a great appreciation for the art of landscape design, a bit more knowledge of cohesive design principles (including my new favorite term, focal point), and most importantly with a concept design for our front yard.  Assuming things go according to plan, our front lawn will be replaced by a French potager-type garden and the area along our driveway will become a small fruit "orchard" consisting of two to three fruit trees.  I don't see the potager portion of the design happening until next year. Particularly since I still have the office and living room projects to complete, a garage to clean out, and a house to paint over the summer.  But, the orchard is something that we can start working on now.  The hard part will be narrowing down our choices of fruit trees down to two or three!!