Showing posts with label Potager. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Potager. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 7, 2016

Danger: Front Yard Vegetable Garden

Several years ago a home near Susanne Hudson put a vegetable garden in their front yard.  It was amazing, stone edged beds, amended soil, extensive.  Passion was palpable.  Then came the front yard garden design police.  Their vegetable garden must go.  Appeals to zoning.  End of the story is awful.  Most of the huge chunks of stone edging, they removed.  Empty vegetable beds.  I should mention the home was older, and not in a subdivision.  The city front yard garden design police won, mean things were said to the offending vegetable garden front yard owners from several arenas.  They sold their home, moved.  Yes, I will make light mention of several homes on the same street with lawns not tended properly, for decades.
.
Pinterest sends a weekly drum roll of my most popular pin.  Huge surprise, below, this week.  Saved recently, it made me smile.  The anger thing.  Joining Lois in her 12-step group for friends & family of alcoholics I learned something quite good about anger.  It will cool your jets, at least mine, when in the midst of personal mushroom cloud anger.  Forgiveness.  Personally asking forgiveness from someone else, for my own expression of anger.  Making amends.  Since having this arrow in my quiver, about anger & forgiveness, most expressions of anger never pass my lips.  Instead, blessedly, I think to myself, "You are absolutely not worth making an amend to."  How very nice to lose anger, know the person is dust beneath my feet, disengage, walk away.
.
Secondarily to living this way, action steps about anger, is the reaction of others, and their anger.  Oh my, they keep going.  And going.  It's an amazing thing to have anger removed, completely, yet the other person is stuck in their anger, and you realize it could be you still behaving this way.  Yes, you'll even smile at the person still angry with you.  In thanks for not being that kind of person any more.  Warning, they won't like your calm smile.        

a moment of patience in a moment of anger saves you a hundred moments of regret // ain't that the truth!
Pic, above, here.

If you are borderline zoning with the front yard garden design police, don't do a 'straight' vegetable garden.  Go historical.  More than aesthetics, you'll have greater pollination, producing up to 80% more fruit/vegetables.
.
Orchard, below, historic, with guilds.  A gorgeous front yard, I think.

Contemporary Designers' Guiness orchard by Robin Baker via gardenista:
Pic, above, here.

Potager, below, mix of vegetables, herbs, flowers, shrubs.  Hedges & edging give all year structure for any down time the vegetables have.

 For acclaimed cookbook author and TV personality Ina Garten, a garden in East Hampton was a top priority. Now, more than a decade later, it is as vibrant and flourishing as her entertaining empire​.:
Pic, above, here.

Another potager, below.

 Tour Bunny Williams's Picture-Perfect Garden:
Pic, above, here.

My 30 year garden was in a subdivision with deed restrictions.  I chose the potager for my front yard, with herbs & espalier fruit trees.  Twice, a neighbor called police about my garden.  Uniformed, and with a gun.  No neighbor ever said anything to me about my garden, ever.  Instead, they called the police.  Yes, it made me angry.
.
Both police officers, they were years apart in arriving, walked my garden with me, and apologized for having to knock on my door.  Told both officers no neighbor ever complained to me.  My garden passed the real police, and their guns.  My front yard potager, legal.
.
Rich story, neighbors complained, police arrived, my gardening continued unabated, and officially police approved.
.
Stories making national news about front yard vegetable gardens, and police becoming involved, immediately make me wish they had done a potager instead of a straight vegetable garden.  I get it about property value, and am a team player.
.
'She had a potager in her front yard', would be fine on my tombstone.      
.
Garden & Be Well,  XOT
.
Anger at the front yard garden design police quite different than anger at a person.  Most front yard garden design police are allowed anonymity.  Let that anger go, and focus on achieving YOUR goals. Hence this little tale of potagers & orchards, historically correct and aesthetic.  Been there, done that, at the wrong end of a gun, got the badge.  Better, kept on gardening, my way.
.
Keep Calm & Potager On

Tuesday, April 5, 2016

Tiny Potager

Moving into our ca. 1900 American farmhouse, almost a year ago, projects in the garden here/there, show wildly decadent rich soil.  1st opportunity of its kind, in my life.
.
Then there's The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan.  A loving book following 4 meals backwards, in USA, to their origination.  Oh my what I didn't know about the industrial food complex.  We're flucked, as a friend is prone to say.
.
Against that flucking, a strong desire for at least a minimal potager.  Is it too much to ask, tasting real food?  Our day jobs don't allow much time for more than a tiny plot this year, tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, radish, a few herbs of course.  Deer are ubiquitous and wind.

Garden:

Pic, above, here.

We'll gather sticks, above, this weekend from our woods.  The entire potager, at most 12' x 4'.  A wrap of fruit tree netting.  Done.
.
Zinnia seeds too.
.
Garden & Be Well,   XO T
.
Of course the patch we have in mind, Beloved must till.  I need to start brewing fertilizer tea from the coop.

Thursday, March 24, 2016

The Language of a Garden's Entry: Not What You Think

Are you aware there is a classic repertoire of garden design language?  You know, the one without words.

A witty welcome, below, shouting, 'Come in'.  Restraint, grandeur, provincial, elegant, color, while informing reams of information about the house and its owner/s.



The language of garden design is quite simple, contrasts.  Simplicity with decadence, rustic with formal.

IMG_4833

Designing an orchard next to this garden room, above, is obvious or at least it should be.
.
I've known this fact for decades, since 1st studying historic gardens across Europe.  Only later, much later, an embarrassing slug's pace, did the epiphany arrive, Providence never separated agriculture from ornamental horticulture.  They are entwined, they are one.
.
Amusing, and sad, how many elementary school gardens are planted with vegetables & herbs, without their contrasting ornamental garden.  Why sad?  It is the ornamental garden adding up to 80% increases to agricultural yields.  How?  Pollinators.  Worse, the full language of a garden is not passed to the elementary school students, nor their teachers.
.
Another way to look at the top pic and garden design?  Most often, in USA, a stone wall leading to an estate or high-end gated neighborhood is fabulously planted with a cornucopia of ornamental plants & monoculture lawn, everything irrigated, chemicaled, maintained.  Ironically, copying the best high-end apartment complexes.  Often, also, a piece of farm acreage purchased to construct a fine home, builds a couple of stone plinths connected with a gate then a few plantings tossed in.  Their new neighbors wondering, "Did that land sell-out to build a starter home subdivision?"  
.
Oh my, the language of garden entry ways.
.
Garden & Be Well, XO T
.
Pics from NaramataBlend.

Friday, April 3, 2015

How to Tame the Chaos


No worries about down time in the potager, below.  Site tuters early, and the chaos disappears.


In a perfect world, you've had time to gather your own brush and cobble them together.
.
Teepee shape is the most my time allows.  5 canes, tied with twine at the top.
.
"Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.”
— Jesus of Nazareth, Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 6:28
 .
Of course the lily toils, if you know basic botany.  And, has a destiny.  Attracting & feeding pollinators, then, in death, to fertilizer the soil.  The metaphor is still clear, and one of my favorites.  Humbling.
.
Potager is more complete than a vegetable garden.  Potager is a mix of vegetables, herbs, flowers.  Extra beauty?  Yes, and more.  Those flowers increase vegetable garden yields by 80%.  For the same effort by you.  Lazy, I adore those odds.
.
6 hours of sun, or more each day, for your potager.  A 10" terra cota pot is plenty for a potager.  Don't read plant tags/books, just stuff the plantings in.  And bamboo teepee.
.
Garden & Be Well,    XO Tara
.
Pic, Pinterest.

Tuesday, September 9, 2014

Garden Design: Dancing Naked in the Potato Patch

Ca. 1900, below, a 1794 engraving.  Have designed across Atlanta for decades, of course I know where the best junk shops are, and go when clients are nearby.
.
Tried not to buy this platter, barely $10, below.  Yet its image seared the might of Providence & what we've lost across centuries.
.
The scene, common until post WWII, and in thanks of Providence.  Food & lifestyle & health & metaphor combined.
.
Why WWII?  Cheap gas, in USA, and the selling of lawn chemicals to housewives 'needing' to protect their children from harmful insects.  Did you know housewives were a first target of international chemical companies?  
.
Men needing their testosterone lawns.  Power equipment, weed free, deep green, perfect.
.
Not where I'm going with this post, just a primer for the direction.
.


Saw the cabbage truck driving, below, last weekend.  A few slid off on the curves & made cole slaw.  Understand the mood we were in?  Adult giggly, silly, happy for a fine day, and down time.



From childhood have adored garden sheds, garages, garden rooms.  The smells, tools, solitude, no adults near, atonement.



 Harvested last weekend, the dirt gracing these potatoes, below, made me want to find their field, take off my clothes and roll.  A primal urge.  I must be a potato'ist, or soil'ist, no man/woman has ever made me feel this way.  Skip naming my team the Redskins, I'm a potato'ist and can name my team the redskins.
.
Soil on these potatoes is alive & asks my hands to reach out and touch.  I do.  There is benediction. Never felt in church.  Read, gout de terroir or, taste of the soil.   


Views from the farm stand, below, there it was again.  Perhaps a slight sprinkle of rain, everyone let's take off our clothes and go dance in the field.  This vanishing threshold of bounty & nature is high church.  Let's give thanks in dance.  Prayers in singing.


Along the side of the road, below, where we first saw the cabbage truck.  This is why Garden Design never bores.  Providence humbles.


Had a wonderful day of Joan Rivers last weekend.  She always said what everyone was thinking anyway.
.
This is what I was thinking at the vegetable stand.
.
Garden & Be Well,    XO Tara
.
I shot the pics last weekend.  
.
Baby, hope this explains why I kept telling you to get the okra but my brain/mouth were saying squash.  Was lost in naked dance with the soil in the fields, thanking Providence.   
.
For a beautiful garden & home filling you with joy, become my client, local/on-line.
.
Award winning speaker, hire me for your group, local/out-of-state.
                                                                                 .
Books by Tara Dillard, Amazon
.
Tara Dillard & Associates Design: farm to city pied-a-terre.
.
Construction by Award Winning
Shaefer Heard Construction, licensed home-builder, renovation - new construction.  Heard's Landscaping a unit of SHC.  3 decades of service.

Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Bunny Williams Potager: Complex, Pretty & Easy Life Support

Have seen potagers, below, for decades.  Across Europe & USA.  
.
Potager: flowers, vegetables, herbs, clipped edging.
.
Recent epiphany about what a potager is.


Mixing flowers & herbs with vegetables increases yields up to 80%.  How?  Increasing pollinator habitat.
.
Clipped hedging keeps chickens out.  Chickens destroy vegetables/herbs/flowers, but eat harmful bugs. 
.
Plus, you get chicken shit.
.
Instead of a merely sweet, pretty, easy, garden design style, the potager was
a life support system throughout much of history.  Terrible history, with subsistence living, wars, plagues, no anti-biotics.
.
How did anyone, aka me, not know this about a potager?  My grandmother knew these things.  My mother falls within the scope of Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique.  The generation of women leaving farms/agrarian knowledge behind to live a modern life raising children, tending house with a maid's help, and no work outside the home.  Oh, the drudgery of it all and yes I'm one of those grown children crying throughout, The Help, every time I watch it.
.
" Friedan says that this change in education arrested girls in their emotional development at a young age, because they never had to face the painful identity crisis and subsequent maturation that comes from dealing with many adult challenges.[9]"
.
Sinful forgetting, a client named this loss of agrarian knowledge.
.
Recently, because I now have chickens, mom has told stories about Grandma's chickens.  Grandma was an RN & head nurse at her hospital in Augusta, GA.  throughout those years she kept chickens and incubated many.  Mom was an only child and said how she hated the time her mother spent with the chickens.  From the stories I know Grandma raised significantly more chickens than her family needed or could feed easily with food scraps.  Why?  Grandma was giving away eggs and laying hens to every woman she met who needed a helping hand.   
.
Garden & Be Well,      XO Tara
.
Pic Bunny Williams
.
For a beautiful garden & home filling you with joy, become my client, local/on-line.
.
Award winning speaker, hire me for your group, local/out-of-state.
                                                                                 .
Books by Tara Dillard, Amazon
.
Tara Dillard & Associates Design: farm to city pied-a-terre.
.
Construction by Award Winning:
Shaefer Heard Construction, licensed home-builder, renovation - new construction.  Heard's Landscaping a unit of SHC.  3 decades of service.

Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Prancing To The Potager

Primal feelings.  Before the sun sets, I will buy lettuce, & whatever else looks pretty, to plant in my potager. 
.
Getting dressed my brain was all about deciding where to find them.
.
After today's appointment, Ashe-Simpson is on the way home.  Hall's is a mile away. 
.
When the cold comes again, & it will, cloches. 
.
A primal planting-the-crop feeling or Marie Antoinette prancing to the potager with her favorite cloche's?

Garden & Be Well,          XO Tara
.
Pic, cloche in my garden.  Have found most of my cloche at TJMaxx thru the years, Tuesday Morning and several at the late Smith&Hawkin.