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Vegetable Gardens Can be Beautiful

© Carol Wallace

When we think of vegetable gardens we think of plants marching along the bed in evenly spaced rows. There is a certain satisfaction in their orderly progression; there is certainly a logical reason for planting in this fashion. It is much easier to weed when you can hoe your row in a nice straight line without fear of decapitating dinner.

The French have no such qualms. They eschew the row method in favor of the ornamental potager. You might think of a potager as a sort of mix between a knot garden and a cottage garden - it has the structured layout of the former, and the mix of edibles and ornamentals that characterize the latter. It may use fruit trees as focal points, and include container gardens as well as those planted in the ground. And they are very beautiful.

Are they more labor intensive? Perhaps. Certainly they are harder to hoe. But if we take a good look at a few practices that have been popular in American gardening over the past decade or so, we may see that the potager-style of edible gardening can be quite practical.

First, take a good look at square foot gardening. Instead of row planting, square foot gardeners planted in -- well -- squares, with a certain number of plants allotted per square foot to encourage maximum yields in minimum space. The traditional method of SqFG is to garden in raised bed cubes and rectangles, but there is no reason why this same method won't work in the ground. Since few veggies other than corn grow in soldierly fashion, this method will produce something of the effect of the "drift" style of planting so favored by the ornamental gardener. Edged with herbs and a few well chosen flowers, your vegetable garden becomes a thing of beauty. The nice thing is, with an intensive planting style like this you don't have to worry too much about weeding, since the plants should shade out the weeds.

Square foot gardening, by the way, led to the French method of bio-intensive planting that really does eliminate most weeding problems as well as increasing the yield. So planting your veggies in appropriately spaced drifts may turn out to be more efficient for you!