Suzchef’s Potager Garden

A Potager garden is a the French version of an English cottage garden, heavier on the vegetables and more artfully laid out.  I haven’t had a proper garden for years, nor kept up our flowers in town due to the squalor on either side of us-it was too depressing to go outside.   Since we have been homesteading at a new location, there has been so much work to do and never enough time or money to get it all done.  

Last year, my garden was terrible due to the soil.  The top soil had been scraped and saved by Dandy Andy the Bulldozer Aficionado, however it was squished back up around the house by Bobcat Russ, rather than back where I thought the garden should be, because we needed it to backfill around the foundation.  I haven’t given up on last year’s garden location (I have big plans for that spot requiring loads and loads of cow and horse manure and a circular garden to drive around) but I thought I would work up beds around the house for a kitchen garden and till up a field that has lain fallow for five years for the sweet corn.  (360 seeds planted last weekend.  260 for the deer and if lucky,  we might get a mess or two.)  Anyway, I decided that a potager garden is exactly what I needed for my back and side yard.  We plowed it, we “disced” it, we roto-tilled it, we burnt up precious deisel and gasoline.  It rained.  We retilled.  It rained again.  Finally, we tilled up the the last section a third time.   That is where we planted about 40 tomato plants that I started from seeds and about 45 strawberry plants of two different varieties.  The poor strawberries were purchased earlier this year, but had to sit in temporary flower pot beds until a couple of weeks ago.

We did till up the front beds last year and nearly everything my daughter and I planted came back.  It is heavy on perennials that hummingbirds and butterflies like.  Since I got a laptop, I often sit on the front porch in the morning before the sun gets high and enjoy the flora and fauna.

Anyway, I actually saw some potager gardening in Greencastle earlier this summer when my son and I went to a lady’s house for a gourd painting 4H workshop.  Her beds were raised beds secured with boards painted white.  Not what I wanted to do.  A:  I don’t want anything that needs painted, and B: I didn’t want to buy a bunch of boards since we need to buy other stuff for our house and C: I wanted to be able to move things as the garden evolved.  So, I used my flat of baby plants that the Cabbage Fairy delivered to church to delineate my paths for this year.   So, I got my veggies and flowers in.  I figure I have to start some way and I can always switch things up as I add yard art, hardscape, etc. 

BUT THEN… Eureka,  I found it! Right off of the old national road.  These snapshots are off my cell phone, so aren’t the greatest and they do not do justice to the little garden I found when I took my son to a 4H thing in Greenfield.

I had a little time to kill and walked around Main Street, wandered through a public garden (which wasn’t as cool as this little garden-except for the Fairy Garden, more later) and walked back up the alley when I ran into this.  I was so excited, I actually stopped on the way out of town and asked the lady in the yard about the garden.  It was her mom’s who lived on the other side of the alley and she came out of her kitchen, which was another story, since she is a Sous Chef and has a catering kitchen and a green house.  She was so nice to share her experience.  Very nice lady!

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Suzchef’s Potager Garden facing west.  This shows the trellises Suz’s husband made for her out of cattle panels.  They come from the store 16 feet long and are hard to transport.  Bolt cutters cut them into thirds.  Then they attached them to electrical conduit that they used for stakes.  I will find out where in Indy they bought the finials they welded to the top.  They also made nifty tomato cages out of them.  They were three sided and could be taken down and laid flat, but since they don’t really rust, she just left them out.  MUCH nicer than the old fence kind that get bent up and rusty.  

Same garden facing east.  The hollyhock just sprung up, probably from a neighbor as they were at several houses.  When the lettuce bolts, she will replace with the pepper plants she grew from seed.  She gave me one and I planted it tonight in a special place.

 

They edged the path with wine bottles and used them to square off the potager beds which were about 6 feet square.  You can see two of those bottles on the right.  The sun hit them and added interest.  She got her bottles at a restaurant.  The occasional cobalt blue bottles were gorgeous in the sun.  Oh, joy.  I like shiny objects.