By Hilda, on July 12th, 2010
This tiny, unassuming vegetable garden caught my eye recently on a garden tour. It was tucked away in the side yard of a rather large, elaborate estate garden, in a sunny spot near the kitchen door. And it reminded me that growing vegetables doesn’t have to be done on a large scale — after all, not everyone wants to put up jars of stewed tomatoes or fill the freezer with bags of pole beans.
Wouldn’t be nice to have just enough produce and fresh herbs to use for summertime meals, without having to deal with a surplus, or constant garden chores? For this kind of small scale gardening, these tiny raised beds seem perfect, eliminating the need for tilling, digging, and amending poor soil. Even though this kitchen garden is very utilitarian, I still found it charming.
Raised beds seem to be a trend right now. I recently saw another very functional raised bed garden on the food blog Hungry Memphis. And the L.A. Times home & garden blog featured a gardener who is using raised beds to grow vegetables in her tiny front yard.
However, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a kitchen garden more beautiful and well planned than Brooke Giannetti’s, below. Brooke blogs about interior design over at Velvet & Linen, where you can enjoy a photo tour of her gorgeous potager. I love the way she’s planted low growing herbs like lemon thyme outside the raised beds to soften the edges a bit!
By Hilda, on July 6th, 2010
Whenever there’s any kind of discussion about heirloom varieties of plants, I immediately think of Thomas Jefferson, so I wanted to pass along this NY Times article. It chronicles how the staff at Monticello today maintain the gardens as authentically as is practical, drawing heavily from Jefferson’s own exhaustive records — between 1726 and 1824, he kept meticulous journals documenting when each seed was sown, and how it fared.
The vegetable garden at Monticello, Charlottesville, Va. (Image source: Wikimedia Commons)
According to the article, our third president was not only a prolific but an innovative gardener who took full advantage of various micro-climates on his estate:
After he left the White House in 1809 and moved to Monticello, his Palladian estate here, Jefferson grew 170 varieties of fruits and 330 varieties of vegetables and herbs, until his death in 1826.
The intense heat and humidity of a Virginia summer explain why colonial gardens were planted only in spring and toward the end of summer, when temperatures cooled. But Jefferson gardened year-round, planting early in heat-collecting beds along the mountain slope and growing heat-loving crops like okra, melons and tomatoes during the scorching summers. He also grew cool-season lettuces long past their time in the low-lying, damper areas farther down the mountain.
Monticello also houses the Thomas Jefferson Center for Historic Plants, a program that collects, maintains and sells a wide selection of heirloom plants, especially those grown by Jefferson or discovered and developed in his lifetime. Some of the veggies being grown today in Michelle Obama’s kitchen garden at the White House come from seeds that originated at Monticello.
Planting Tip:
Growing Heirloom Tomatoes in Dry Climates
For all you California and Western gardeners out there, the L.A. Times home & garden blog has a great piece about heirloom tomatoes. It touches on the fact that heirloom varieties come true from seed, unlike modern hybrids, and offers tips for separating the seeds from the fruit to save them.
