North Country Reflections

Always a vegetable garden

Everywhere I have lived I have made a vegetable garden …typically rectangular and sized to match whatever space was both sunny and near the house. The vegetables were delicious, but I always craved more.

So when we moved to Vermont I decided the old potato field to the south of the barn would be perfect for a real country kitchen garden. It is not too far from the kitchen and offers excellent southern exposure, while the barn provides ample storage for tools, poles, fertilizer and more.

I started out with ‘yet another rectangle’, this one an ample sixty feet long by forty feet wide, giving me fifteen or so rows, each forty feet long, (a total of about 600 square feet of growing space) and oriented in an ideal east-west direction.

Why not a rectangle?

But I soon discovered the entire space was daunting, and my rectangle was neither efficient nor attractive!!

After a full morning of weeding and planting, I would complete a couple of rows (at most), while the remainder looked both ugly and messy.  Not very pretty!

I was also weeding all that space between the rows just for me to walk on. What a waste!

And the overall space did not lend itself particularly well to crop rotation, nor to permanent plantings like fruit bushes.

So, being human, each spring I would gradually favor the flower beds that were visible from the house and before long the veggie garden became an ‘out-of sight and out-of-mind’ mess.  And the weedier it got, the less I wanted to work in it…a vicious cycle indeed!

A garden to match my personality

After about six years of this I decided to do an entire make-over of the whole space, combining my personal predilections, lessons learned from past gardens, and ideas gleaned from others.

I came up with a wish list for my kitchen garden:

• It had to be both FUN and FUNCTIONAL.
• It must be ATTRACTIVE and VISUALLY INTERESTING
• It should be SIMPLE  and UNFUSSY, as I have neither the time nor the inclination to create an intricate ‘potager’ style veggie garden that seems to be in currently vogue
• Its design should be FLEXIBLE enough that I can modify my crop choices…who knows, maybe next year I will want to grow potatoes
• It must foster a ‘DIVIDE AND CONQUER’ approach, whereby I can complete a portion of the garden without having a huge guilt complex about the remainder.

Here is how it came out:

A Four-Square Kitchen Garden

I decided upon a simplified version of a Four-Square garden design dating back to both Old England and to American colonial times.

Four beds for annual crops

At the heart of the garden are four slightly raised beds for annual vegetables. Each bed is twelve-foot square and bisected by a single east-west path (made of left-over lumber), providing a total of about 500 square feet of growing space. (And for a smaller garden, four eight-foot beds square will provide 225 square feet of growing space.)

Each bed is large enough to grow either one or two crops a season…salad greens, chard, squash, kale, beans, tomatoes etc.  I use attractive trellises for climbing crops like edible-podded peas, pole beans and cucumbers.

I rotate the contents of the squares annually in a clock-wise direction. This all makes for a nice tidy rotation system, while still allowing for minor adjustments in the space allocated to a particular crop to reflect our changing desires.

To keep the wild creatures at bay…

the entire space is enclosed by a four-foot high wire fence with a cedar cap, and a single gate at the north end.  Moose won’t walk through a visible fence.  And so far the deer have not tried to jump inside, I assume because the interior space appears too confining.  If they ever do decide to jump, my back-up plan is to run wires decorated with colored flags above the fence. Once a woodchuck came visiting, so we dosed the entrance with urine….either that or the presence of our dog were deterrent enough…and  we never saw him again.

Fruit bushes

Inside the fence there is also a three-foot deep perimeter bed. Along its east, south and west sides I grow different kinds of fruit…rhubarb, raspberries, black-currants, red-currants and gooseberries.  On the north side, I use the two halves, flanked by the gate, for tomatoes and summer squash (on alternating sides each year). To give these heat loving crops  an extra boost of sun and warmth we attach reflective foil panels to the fence.

Five-foot wide grass paths…

separate all the beds. These are wide enough to move around a good-sized garden cart comfortably throughout the garden.

The results…

have been immensely gratifying. The garden is sized about right, both for our needs and for my ability to manage. We grow most of our summer vegetables, plus additional to put by for the months ahead.

And certainly on a warm summer evening, nothing beats going up to the garden to harvest supper.

Taking stock

As the season draws to a close  this is the perfect time to consider what has worked well versus what could stand improvement in future. Decide whether you want a few raised beds to give you summer salads and tomatoes,  or an extensive plot to fill your tummy in summer and your freezer for winter…or perhaps something in between.

Speaking personally,  I need to remind myself:

More is not necessarily better!!

Here are some questions to guide your garden plans for the coming season:

• Is your current garden too big…or too small? How much growing area will meet your needs?
• Does your appetite for gardening match the demands of your garden?
• What produce does your family really enjoy?  Do you need more…or less…of some crops?
• Could your garden layout be more efficient…and more attractive?
• Do you want to invest in raised beds or a surrounding fence?

Jot down the answers now, while your memories are fresh.  Then in January, as the catalog avalanche begins, make plans for the new season with your eyes open.