Border a French kitchen garden with violets for visual impact and to add sweet aromatic flavor to salads.
Inspired by the historical designs of gardens from the French Renaissance, the intention of a French kitchen garden is to add visual appeal to the food source. Also referred to as a potager, a French kitchen garden contains a combination of fruits, edible flowers, herbs and vegetables. They have a formal, structured design with geometric patterns, and incorporate shrubs, perennials and cold weather flowers to give the garden year-round appeal.
Instructions
1. Assess the space you have for the French kitchen garden. Note how much sun the site gets, the type of soil and the amount of space you have to work with. Does the area have good drainage or is it low-lying?
2. Browse images and details of French kitchen gardens for design inspiration. Look for examples of surprising color and texture combinations. For instance, spiderwort's purple flowers make the purplish leaves of red cabbage pop. Mixed rows of fava beans and ruby chard look more like a tapestry than dinner ingredients.
3. Draw basic sketches of different design ideas, taking your site and the plants you intend to use into account. Choose a pattern that will work for your space. One traditional layout is a rectangle divided into four equal squares, with a sculpture or sundial as the center focal point.
4. Refer to the site's growing conditions to select plants. Choose only vegetables, herbs and fruits you like to cook with. Tomatoes, eggplant, peppers and heirloom peas with deep purple pods add color to the garden and serve as primary ingredients in many dishes. Sage, chives, anise hyssop and purple coneflower are a few herbs that offer subtle fragrances, delicate foliage and flowers. Violets and hibiscus are edible flowers typically added to salads and drinks.
5. Prepare the soil for your garden by removing grass, weeds and large rocks. Add native topsoil to raise its surface height 3 to 4 inches above ground level. Mix garden compost into the soil to improve its moisture and nutrient retention. Compost also adds oxygen to clay soil and healthy bacteria.
6. Map out your garden arrangement. Visualize how the garden will look from different angles and plan the layout so you have access to each plant for watering, weeding, harvesting and other maintenance tasks. Use the smallest flowers and herbs as borders, and put the largest plants in the back to allow for good light and air flow.
7. Use a hand shovel to plant each seed, seedling and plant to the depth and spacing requirements specified on the instructions. Identify plants with a small wooden stake.
8. Cover the soil with a 1-inch layer of mulch to prevent weeds and keep the ground moist.
9. Water your French kitchen garden according to its needs. New plants need more water for the first few weeks as the root systems develop.
