The Making of A Kitchen Garden

">

From the start, making a kitchen garden was a priority. In my mind’s eye, it was inspired by a cross between Mr McGregor’s garden in Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit and a perfectly laid out French potager of geometric patterns, paths and enclosures, containing enticing rows of flowers and veg alike.

I craved something as symmetrical as possible (almost nothing here is) and the area that was most likely to fulfil my vision was behind the old dairy. At the time, I was running back and forwards to Sydney and around the countryside in my capacity as an interior designer, Larry was commuting each day to the city, and our eldest daughter was a baby.

Suffice to say, the vision took time to implement. Fast forward to today, where the kitchen garden is at the very core of all activity at Glenmore House (workshops and events, including kitchen gardening days where we share as much information as possible about growing your own food). It’s made up of eight 3m x 3m raised beds: four laid out in their family groups (leafy greens, legumes, roots and fruiting veg) to one side of my original apple arch, and four to the other. These family groups are interspersed with other species to confuse pests.

Practical Harvest

The summer Kitchen Garden includes beans, tomatoes, cucurbits and sweet potatoes Grown up bamboo structures.

I build plant support structures out of locally available materials. Not only do climbing plants create a romantic aesthetic, they’re also much easier to harvest from waist-height than on your hands and knees. I also prefer my legumes clear of the earth and find that bush beans, for example, are inclined to lurk on the ground without staking, resulting in fungal disease. So I prefer them up in the air where they can hang, encouraging good air circulation.

I also use a combination of twigs and sticks (prunings from the espaliered fruit trees), rammed into the soil, to delineate areas where I sow seeds. These enclosures resemble basket-like structures and act as quite effective pest barriers. At the end of the season, they go into the compost with all the other spent material.

Tweet