The Potager Kitchen Garden (Or Flowers In Your Vegetable Beds), A Vegetable Garden Layout

Would you like to grow your own fresh vegetables at home in a plant garden layout which is sexy as well as productive?  A potager kitchen garden is a vegetable garden in which there’s a delightful mix of plants, herbs, flowers and perhaps even a fruit tree or 2.  Get some ideas here for planning your own potager design. 

Origins

The French kitchen garden, called the potager ( expounded pot-ah-zhay ) historically provided the ingredients for potage ( soup or plant broth ).  In medieval times the priests and nuns used these kitchen gardens to provide flowers for the church and vegetables for the inhabitants of the abbey.  Whereas the English cottage garden is a random, random collection of flowers, veggies and herbs growing together, these potagers were geometric and ordered. 

Layout

The potager garden may be small or large and is generally made of square, oblong, circular or diamond-shaped garden beds arranged in a repeating geometrical pattern.  The plants in the beds are also planted in groups or patterns.  In a bigger garden, the entire garden may be encircled by a clipped hedge with an arbor for a climbing vine ( e.g.  Passion fruit ) to mark the entrance. 

Advised Plants

The idea is to have masses of colour and interesting textures – colorful frilly lettuces to border the trails, swiss chard with brightly coloured stems, curly blue-green kale, purple growing broccoli, red chicory, red-stemmed beetroot, feathery carrots ( their leaves that is ), runner beans on a tepee with beautiful red flowers and long green pods, French climbing beans with green, purple or yellow pods, feathery asparagus and colorful fruiting vegetables such as chili peppers, sweet peppers, tomatoes and eggplant. 

Besides the flowers on the plants, you may plant edible flowers, grow flowers for their companion planting properties or for cut flowers.  Common companion flowers include marigold, nasturtium, chamomile and yarrow.

Go to my on-line resources for vegetable garden plans and find out Starting a Vegetable Garden for Beginners.