A Soup Garden by Bonnie Manion ~ Photographs by Clay Perry
Do you wish you
could extend the “fresh vegetable concept” of summer throughout the year by growing your vegetables year-round. Well, you can, and it is much easier than you think. It is an age-old concept borrowed from the French, called the “potager” or literally translated “soup garden.” In America, generally speaking, our traditional backyard vegetable garden consists of planting the garden in the spring, reaping fresh produce over the summer, and sometimes utilizing the abundance of the harvest by freezing or preserving for use over the winter or for another time. Americans, unlike the French and other Europeans, do not normally have a vegetable garden year-round. This might be changing now. One of the hottest food trends today is “growing your own vegetables”. Gardeners want to keep the “fresh produce concept” alive after the summer has waned. We all know that fresh strawberries out of a morning garden for breakfast, or fresh green beans harvested still warm from the sun, are a delight to the senses and incomparable. There are many wonderful elements which embody a potager such as enclosure,
pathways, borders, structure, order, chaos, beauty, small trees, garden ornaments, the intertwining of function and beauty, and the romantic mixing of vegetables and flowers rotating through their seasons. Elements That Define A Potager 1) A potager is usually defined by some type of enclosure. Enclosure can be defined as walls, fences, or thick hedges. Some of these enclosures can be a working surface for your potager, for espaliered fruit
trees, support for tall plantings, and heat retention. Enclosure protects from competing critters and forces such as wind. 2) Pathways are important to divide your plots, create travel pathways, and working space to care for your potager. Pathways may be made of materials such as coarse mulch, gravel, bricks, cement, or even bare soil. 3) Borders can be of a permanent design, for instance growing a low boxwood hedge, a “wood box” edge, or a stone border. Borders may also echo seasonal plantings such as a www.blikki.com - 25