Kitchen Garden
The kitchen garden is coming back, but this time around it is more a part of the garden, or more of a garden in itself, not just a vegetable patch.
Kitchen gardens are returning to their roots, as it were, when in Europe and early America they were small, self-contained, in-town gardens, close by the kitchen and filled with whatever the cook needed. In them grew everything from fruits to vegetables, neatly laid out and carefully cared for.
Should you consider bringing fruits, vegetables and herbs back into your garden--in the form of a kitchen garden--there is no better time to plan and plant than now.
“I grew up on a farm in the Loire Valley in France,” says Michele Maullins, who now maintains a small, in-town kitchen garden with a distinctly European flavor.
“In a city like this, it’s such a pleasure to grow your own produce. From my bedroom I can see the garden, and every morning I check its progress first thing. Just watching it grow is worth the effort.”
In the city, where lots are small and getting smaller all the time as people add on to their homes, finding a place for a kitchen garden is the trick. In the Maullins’ garden--on a narrow lot in Santa Monica--the logical spot was obvious--in the middle of the lawn, “where a swimming pool might be,” adds Maullins, “but it’s much better exercise.”
That’s where the most sun is and where it would be closest to the kitchen--perhaps the two most important ingredients of a kitchen garden.
Before the notion of landscaping entered the garden scene, the kitchen garden was always right outside the back door, where it was handy if a sprig of this or a bunch of that was needed.
Says Maullins: “There is nothing like picking your own herbs seconds before you use them, or greens for a salad, or peaches for a pie,” but they had better be close by. Out of sight, out of mind.
In the Maullins’ garden the peach tree, plum, apricot, grapefruit, lime, lemon, blood orange and a row of blackberries line the south-facing fence and run the length of the property line. The herbs and vegetables grow where lawn did in a 10-by-12-foot area just outside the back door.
When she began, almost all the vegetables were started from seed brought home from France, and there are still such things as haricots verts and arugula, though the garden now includes good old American corn as well (a request from her husband).
“In the summer, I grow just about everything my family eats, but I never leave a spot in the garden empty. As soon as one vegetable finishes up, I plant another,” Maullins says.
This small garden is so productive she has enough extra for canning and preserving, and still some to give to friends and neighbors. She even grew enough to use some of the garden-fresh produce in her former catering business. “I’m not yet completely satisfied,” Maullins adds, “I still want to integrate it more into the rest of the garden, and find room for a big picnic table so we can eat in the garden.”
It would not be hard to imagine a rustic stone path cutting through the garden, with herbs growing between the stones, a picket fence and gate with berries or beans trained on it, a Dutch door leading to the kitchen from which one could watch the progress of the garden; and that big harvest table.
Kate Winston, 4 1/2, has a garden in the Little Holmby area of Los Angeles that is also distinctly old world in its mixing of fruits, vegetable and herbs in a neat and well-tended kitchen garden. The garden is actually her mother’s, but Kate knows everything in the garden and has her own little patch of strawberries.
Her mother, Kitty Winston, found the perfect spot for a kitchen garden in an unused space behind the garage. In its center grow dwarf fruit trees, and in their shade she grows salad greens and some herbs that appreciate a little shelter from the summer sun.
In winter, the garden is bathed in sun because the trees are deciduous and bare. She is careful not to plant too much, lest the vegetables compete with the roots of the fruit trees.
A neat path of gravel (no muddy shoes here), held in place by a brick border, encircles the trees and outlines the beds for sun-loving vegetables and herbs that border this kitchen garden. And there is a place to sit with a small table and a rather jolly scarecrow that can be moved about the garden when birds threaten the harvest.
The area only measures about 20-by-20 feet, but it too produces more than enough for the Winston family, with the excess going to friends or into canning jars. Kitty Winston’s garden was also inspired by fond memories of her grandfather’s acre vegetable garden in Virginia and she finds it a “valuable connection with the earth in a big city.” She adds that “some of the best time spent with my daughter is out in the garden digging around or scattering seed, or bringing in the harvest.”
