Garden Studios

When you should grow a couple of salads, herbs and vegetables for the kitchen but don’t fancy the look of a conventional allotment right next to the home, a potager is the best compromise. It’s a good looking and productive design borrowed from the grand chateau gardens of France. Planting is in formal beds, edged with low and tightly clipped hedging, but other than flowers you grow edible veg, setting it out in geometric patterns in preference to straight rows. 

Prepare your site

Do your site and soil preparation now, so you’re able to start sowing and planting in spring. First, mark the realm out, using canes and string. a proper potager could be circular, oblong or square in plan, subdivided into equal-sized segments that radiate from the centre. So that you can be more informal, create a sequence of interconnected teardrop shapes, identical to those in a paisley pattern. 

Paths running around the edge and between the segments can form element of the pattern, in addition to providing easy accessibility to crops. Cover the trails between beds with gravel, or sink bricks or paving slabs in position to create an organization, all-weather surface. In case you prefer grassy paths, lay turf but 

sink a couple of paving slabs, one pace apart, to behave as stepping stones. Set them fairly deep so a mower will pass safely excessive . But be warned that grassy paths are relatively high-maintenance and you’ll get wet feet when picking winter veg.

Before planting, dig the floor over, working in well-rotted organic matter akin to garden compost, manure or the contents of last year’s growing bags. Remove weeds, stones or roots and rake level.

Plant edgings

For a proper look, once soil conditions allow, plant a row of dwarf box or teucrium (mercifully free from box blight) to stipulate the potager and edge the trails within it. Box edging will need clipping twice through the growing season, teucrium only once.

But to take advantage of productive use of a small space, you could opt to use culinary herbs and salads on your edgings. Choose parsley, chives, upright thyme or cut-and-come-again lettuces – “Red Salad Bowl” is right and might be planted from April onwards. Alternatively you need to use “step-over” apple trees. These horizontal cordons grow about six feet long and a foot high, and will produce one apple per foot of stem.

Creating patterns

Plant each segment of the potager with one other crop. If appropriate, subdivide large segments so that you can include a much wider selection. Wherever possible, plant sorts of veg with colourful leaves, flowers or fruit, similar to purple French beans, red frilly lettuces or rainbow chard. Choose crops with contrasting shapes, colours or textures to grow as neighbours (including carrots for feathery foliage, rhubarb chard for purplish-red leaves, Tuscan black kale for crinkly, deep-green foliage) and plant a sequence of short rows to fill the form (completely random planting makes weeding difficult). 

Make an ornamental centrepiece 

A high centrepiece works well as a focus on the heart of your potager. Create a circular or diamond-shaped bed and use it to plant tall crops resembling purple Brussels sprouts, tomatoes, sweet corn, or globe or Jerusalem artichokes. Provide an ornamental support for climbing beans or outdoor cucumbers. Another idea can be to put a big, bottomless container within the centre and use it to grow golden courgettes, for you to cascade down round the edges.

Alternatively, plant compact herbs (marjoram and creeping thymes), edible flowers (heartsease) or annual flowers (dwarf sweet peas for cutting, buckwheat or poached-egg plant to draw pollinating bees and beneficial insects comparable to hoverflies). And don’t forget nasturtiums, which always look good with veg. 

Cultivating your veg patch

Grow crops as though they were planted conventionally. Prior to sowing or planting, sprinkle a general fertiliser similar to blood, fish and bone evenly over the prepared soil and rake it in. 

Try to maintain on top of weeds, since they may spoil the look of your beds in addition to compete with crops for nutrients and water. Keep edgings tidily clipped, snipped or picked. To keep the ornamental effect all season, once one crop has finished and been cleared, have a brand new batch of plants able to replant each segment. 

Plant of the week

Stripy evergreen sedges 

Variegated evergreen sedges are ideal for adding colour to a winter garden.

They are grass-like but with leaves that last all winter without looking tired or turning brown. For prime visibility, choose a lemon-and-lime striped variety similar to Carex elata “Aurea”, which makes showy 12 to 18-inch tufts in moist soil. C oshimensis “Evergold” is best for drier soils and pots. Create a stripy carpet under evergreens or shrubs with 

C morrowii “Ice Dance”, that’s unfussy about soil and fine in shade. It looks lovely with snowdrops and other spring bulbs.