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!!

Strawberry Fields Forever

Our Strawberry Patch

...well not quite yet.  We finally got a bit of sun this past weekend and I decided it was time to find a patch of dirt for the strawberry plants that I've had in a pot for a year.  I planted these guys in our garden a few years ago and left them in over the winter because I felt bad taking them out when they seemed to be doing just fine.  Remarkably they survived the winter and produced a decent crop last summer. However, last fall I decided to move them from the garden into pots to make way for our first winter garden.  At the moment my strawberry patch is pretty small (and nowhere near constituting a field or enough strawberries for my little munchkin), but I'm planning a trip to the nursery to get these guys some friends and we'll see how large our patch can get.

Edible Landscaping

View of a front yard with edible landscaping

Last summer my husband and I were taking a stroll along the beach and on our way home we passed by this amazing front yard that incorporated a variety of garden fruits and vegetables into the landscaping (cucumbers, strawberries, chard, etc.) (see picture).  And the best part about this edible  landscaping (other than the edible part) was that it was so subtle, elegant, and surprisingly non-vegetable garden looking.  It was so subtle in fact that we almost strolled right on past without noticing.  I had read about edible landscaping before but had never seen it executed with such style.  We were smitten and decided that we'd like to incorporate edible landscaping in a similar manner in our yard.  Enter blueberries...

Cucumber, tomatoes, strawberries, and lavender

A month earlier we had visited a local blueberry farm to do some blueberry picking and fell in love with blueberry bushes.  Given our son's penchant for blueberries and the fact that we had a nice little space open in our back yard we decided that blueberries would be our first experiment in the edible landscaping arena.  Not that we don't have other edible landscaping (we have figs, lemons, and guavas in our back yard), but they came with the house and there is plenty of space for more.  After a few months of prepping the soil with coffee grounds generously donated by my coworkers (blueberries need acidic soil) we decided it was time to plant.  So yesterday we headed off to a local nursery and picked up Sunshine and Misty.  As we've learned, you need to have at least two bushes of different varieties.  Sunshine and Misty are varieties that have relatively small bushes (so they'll work in our small space) and they bear fruit at different times of the season (so we can maximize our berry picking time).


We'll see how our first experiment into edible landscaping goes.  If it goes well we'll be replacing four large bushes in our front yard with several varieties of blueberry bushes.  And we already have big plans for some strawberry plants in the front yard once spring rolls around.