In today’s gardens, a vegetable garden is mostly in a separated spot, while the rest of the garden is filled with lawn, maybe a pond and ornamental plants and perennials. I think, however, that vegetable plants can also develop a beauty that we normally only see in ornamental plants.

A different approach is the so-called “kitchen garden”, a concept that reaches back to the European renaissance, were noblemen built vegetable gardens not only for a constant supply of legumes and herbs to their kitchen, but also as eye-catchers. These gardens contained both crop plants and ornamental plants and looked like imitations of the kings’ parks (like Versailles near Paris or Sansoucci near Potsdam) with their structured and symmetric layout. I’ll give you some tips on what to pay attention to if you want to follow this layout for your own vegetable garden.

How to create the general layout

Residential kitchen gardens were parts of larger, symmetrically ordered gardens and thus quite formal. If you think that this form would be too strict for your garden, you can lean more towards a wild “cottage garden”-style. In the “historically correct” form of kitchen gardens, paved paths lead through the different vegetable patches so you can easily reach all of them.
The pathways shouldn’t be too narrow – they should be sufficiently wide for a hand barrow. The patches are separated like a chessboard; the whole garden may be surrounded by a hedge.

What plants to choose for your vegetable garden?

A possible layout for a small kitchen garden

Which combination of plants should be planted in the separate beds depends on how they harmonize with the adjoining beds in colour. Generally, it’s nice to have differences in height: Simple flat beds look a bit boring and are not really a sight for sore eyes. Try to incorporate trellises for beans or other climbers. You should also combine vegetables and ornamental plants of different heights in the kitchen garden: This could be cabbage and lady’s mantle, for example, or corn and geraniums, spinach and dahlias etc.

These plants also differ in color: I.e. the blossoms of lady’s mantle are golden-orange, while cabbage is of a light green. I find it better to not combine two many colors in adjacent beds – if you spread the colors over the garden, it will look a bit more structured while retaining the lovely flair of a kitchen garden.

How to improve your kitchen garden

The tips I’ve given above may seem quite simple – however, the devil is in the details. First of all, a kitchen garden will not look good unless you’re constantly improving it. Try to keep it as full and lush as possible and whenever you’ve got the feeling that something’s missing in a patch, choose a new and surprising plant for it.

A kitchen garden – the envy of your neighborhood

I would also advise you to make more from the borders of patches: As kitchen gardens often have a strict structure and are not as densely planted due to the fact that vegetables are often taken from the patch when they’re ripe, the garden could from time to time look a bit empty. To counteract this, you can plant smaller plants like lavender, curry-plant or salvia around the borders of the patches. Be careful to make these fit the main plants in the respective bed.

Trellises can also be an amazing sight, especially when they’re home-made (f.e. irom hazel branches). They don’t necessarily have to be grown by climbers all year but are eyecatchers themselves.

Pay attention to roughly following the rules of crop rotation. This is especially true for plants like cabbages that drain lots of nutrients from the soil – they can be followed f.e. by peas (peas can restore the soil’s nitrogen).

For great impressions on how nice a kitchen garden can be, I recommend you to have a look at  the BBC series “The Victorian kitchen garden” from the 1980s on youtube!

Vertical elements are among the most defining pieces of a garden layout and are a crucial way to give your garden a more interesting and individual style. Gardens that feature ivy-clad pergolas, elevated terraces, raised beds and walls can give you a feeling of really being “at home”; they also show your garden’s treasures only piece by piece instead of all at once.

How you should apply such elements depends, of course, on the surrounding of your garden: If your neighbours’ gardens are quite flat and the only separation between your garden and theirs is a low fence, it will look awkward if you start to construct high raised beds, stone gardens etc. on your property. However, if you for example have a garage wall at one side of your garden, this will give you an excellent starting point. The following tips are what I find really interesting – don’t be shy to adopt them to your garden and use them as fits you.

A brick wall covered with lady’s mantle

1.) Free-standing walls

The effect of walls made of brick, sandstone or logs can give an amazing effect to your garden layout. Depending on how you build them, they can give a “romantic ruin”-type feeling or that of orderliness and structure. Use free-standing walls of ca. 3 to 4 feet to separate vegetable patches from the rest of your garden; grow them with plants such as lady’s mantle (as seen on the photo above) and perhaps put a garden bench to their front side.

A pergola on a large compound adding structure and emphasis on the pathway

2.) Pergolas

Pergolas can be great both as elements on their own as well as a cover for pathways through your garden. I find it especially amazing to combine them with large trees that will make up a natural part of your pergula. Build them adjacent to a wall for a more subtle effect or free-standing as a real eye-catcher, preferably overgrown with wild-wine or ivy to to provide a better “fit” into your garden. Another great possibility is to build a small pergola either on an elevated terrace or in a lower part of your garden (surrounded by raised beds). BBC Gardening offers a nice guide to constructing your own pergola.

A straight stairway leading through a raised bed

3.) Raised beds and stairways

Raised beds are good on their own (as they make the care for demanding plants easier), but their optical effect on your garden layout even increases if you combine them with sophisticated stairways. Stairways can be winding, at right angle or straight; they can be made of large sandstones or of single stones that make up mosaics. You may think that it’s quite expensive to optain the necessary materials, but you can also get some of it from building rubble and second-hand dealers. Be careful to construct supporting walls if you want to create high raised beds, as the weight of new soil can put too much pressure on simple cemented brick walls.

This winding stairway creates a path up a “rock garden” type raised bed

“Square foot gardening” has pretty much become a buzzword that you will come across sooner or later if you’re browsing gardening websites. It’s a concept that aims at both increasing yields (for vegetables) on a small area and also appeals to a certain “chic”. As its name says, it’s about creating a small patch for vegetable (or ornamental, or both) plants the size of four x four feet. This patch is further divided into 16 fields. This patch is intensively grown with plants that complement each other in nutrient use and symbiotic effects.

You can create the patch by building borders to the rest of your garden from wood, stone or other materials. This bed may be raised or even (raised is preferable for reasons of irrigation). Each field (1 x 1 square) is planted with one or more vegetables, depending on its size (f.e. you could plant about 4-9 onions or strawberries in one square or one cabbage). You don’t only have to plant vegetables but can include ornamental plants as well, some of which may have good effects on other plants: Mustard seed may repel snails, alfalfa is good for regenerating the nitrogen levels, and some other ornamental plants like poppies are simply beautiful.

Actually, I like the square foot gardening system a lot. Although at first glance it may seem a bit arbitrary and more fashionable than useful, it has some advantages which I want to point out here:

A.) Size:

It’s nice to know that you can grow a lot of plants even if you have only limited space (a balcony). What’s more important (in my eyes) is that you don’t waste space in your garden, as the borders for the vegetable patch are clearly defined (and you may plant lawn around it).

B.) Organizing:

I sometimes had the problem in my vegetable gardens that the space between rows would be overgrown with weeds, and it always takes a lot of time to get rid of them. When you’re following the square-foot-gardening method, on the other hand, plants are growing so dense that weeds just don’t get much sunlight and have less space to grow (and are also easier to pluck out).

You also notice at once if one of the sixteen fields is not used and will be able to choose a new plant for it.

C.) The Look:

You can unleash your creativity and create a box that’s good to use and also nice to look at. Intensively grown patches look much more attractive than long rows of mono-cultures.

Disadvantages:

Of course, the concept comes with some disadvantages. You’ll have to decide for yourself  to put up with these.

A.) The price of diversity:

Biodiversity is great, but the compactness of square-foot-gardens call for having a different plant in every of the sixteen fields. If your main focus is to grow a large amount of one specific plant, another system may be more efficient for you.

B.) Sustainability:

It’s not enough to exchange a handful of earth with compost each year to compensate for the nutrient loss the soil suffers. You will need to grow cover crops on one patch the one year and switch back to vegetables the other.

C.) More style than substance?

In my eyes, the concept is not as well-known as it is for its practical use but for the reason of it being a well-marketed catchword. That’s why my advice is: Don’t stick to the “rules” but use the idea to create something that fits your garden. If a strict organizational pattern (division of a patch into rectangular smaller fields) is fine for you, use it!

I hope you like this short introduction to square-foot-gardening. As I find the topic of planting intensively on small areas quite interesting, I will write a follow-up article on companion plants and sustainability of soil in the following days.

After not being here for a few months I would like to share some of my thoughts with you, which I had in winter. I thing it’s a very good start and workout for my rusty fingers

Form follows Function – Even in Gardening

One of the most important steps in creating a garden you’ll love in the long term is to think about the general layout. I have made the experience that it’s indispensable to know what you want your garden to be like before even thinking about which plants to grow, whether to have a pond etc.

Your garden is a part of your life!

Remember, form should follow function – your garden is a part of your life, and you will want to get the highest satisfaction from it.

• Do you want to have small place to relax after work?
• Do you want to have a giant green for throwing barbecue parties?

Design a concept!

You best decide what shall be the central place of your garden and make a concept out of it. This may seem strenuous in the beginning, but you will be thankful once you’ve pulled it through and earn the results.

Let’s for example take a small place to recline and get away from everyday stress – a bench perhaps, or a deck chair. Think of the surroundings you find most suiting for it, and create shapes around it.

Go into yourself!

Don’t limit yourself to rectangular shapes – think circles, cones (a cone of grass that leads to a small terrace, maybe?) or even spirals for your greens, flowerbeds and bushes. You’ll have to decide whether you’ll want your resting place secluded in a corner of your garden or exposed and encircled by the rest.

I’ve always found it rewarding to not only draw a concept, but to cut out some pieces of paper and to arrange them. If you’re indecisive, take your time and think it over – just don’t take the easiest alternative. A great layout will always reward you in the long term!

My first roses article had so many readers, so I decided to write another one. It is not hard to do, if you know how to plant roses correctly. I hope you enjoy it. Here it is:

Choose the correct location

Roses love the sun

Like us human, roses also love airy places with guaranteed sunshine. On appropriate locations for roses robust varieties will have a vital life without the use of pesticides. Sunny locations provide a quick drying of wet rose leaves, so the vulnerability to get fungal diseases is mitigated significantly. Roses have deep roots that go down into the ground pretty quickly.

In the garden of roses they therefore prefer a deep, sandy-loamy soil with adequate humus and nutrient proportions. The soil is not much important – roses grow in all uncompressed garden ground. Where other ornamental trees grow without problems, also a rose is garden possible.

A totally unsuitable location for roses is below the crowns of old, deciduous trees. In the drip area of the crowns, the leaves of the rose plant do not dry fast enough, mildew finds an ideal breeding ground.

Note: Before you plant roses on sites that already have grown roses for several years, you should find out about appropriate measures how to prevent stunted growth of newly planted roses.

Locations for potted roses

You know, roses are sun lovers, but they are no heat fanatics. This is especially true for big roses in pots and containers, which endure the hot summer days on off-sun terrace sites. Extremely hot south-facing slopes, combined with heat-storing walls, paving stones and asphalt, act like an oven. This results in leaf burn. Also the extreme air dryness promotes the spread of spider mites, which can be annoying pests.

Prepare soil well

Before planting roses soil preparation is important. Soil compressions are essential to break.  Remove before planting  roses all root weeds – preferably with a digging fork – out of the bed. Soil improvers lead the organic materials back to the bio-circulation, a process that promotes life in the soil and thus the growth of roses.

How to plant correctly

Remove any damaged roots (just above the damaged area). The fine roots generally remain uncut, because the more of them remain at the rose tree, the safer the growing is. The aerial green shoots of bare-rooted roses are to be cut back to about eight inch (scissors length) with a sharp pair of scissors. All the roses that are planted with bare root, you should generally put in a water bath before the fall or spring planting for four to five hours (with all shot and root parts).

The planting hole should be a few inches larger as the bale or bare root. Mix some slow-release fertilizer granules under the potting soil. The bottom of the hole you should be thoroughly loosen to with a digging fork, so that water drainage is possible well. Now place the rose vertically in the planting hole. Ideally, a second helper holds the rose, so that the roots dangle free and unbent in the planting pit.

After planting the graft union must be located 5 inch deep in the earth. Also, the planting depth of container roses is not oriented on the ball size, but rather at the graft union of the rose. Fill the planting hole with soil and contact the rose slightly with the paragraph. While doing keep the rose firmly so that the important height position does not changes seriously.  Sludge the rose tree with the garden hose after planting to fill any voids and to ensure optimal ground circuit.

Never forget ridging

After planting, ridge the soil around the rose about 6 inch high, so that you can see only the shoot tips of the rose bush. You should do this whether you plant in spring or in autumn. It protects roses from wind, sun and frost.  Remove the ridge at the fall planting in April and at the spring planting eight weeks after – but at the earliest, when the new shoots have reached a length of 4 inch.