5 Kitchen garden designs

Vegetable garden design

FANCY GROWING YOUR OWN VEGETABLE GARDEN? Just choose a style to suit your space and get planting your kitchen garden!

Nothing beats the crunch of a freshly dug carrot or the sweetness of a strawberry plucked from the plant from your own vegetable garden, and an ever-increasing range of fruit and vegetable seeds available, growing your own kitchen garden has never been easier, even in the smallest of garden spaces. With a little know-how, anyone can have a go and taste the rewards by vegetable garden planning.

The best site for a kitchen garden is an open, sunny spot not overshadowed by trees. Don’t tuck vegetables away out by sight from the house for they are every bit as decorative as flowers.

It’s so satisfying to grow your own food, and, since many vegetables mature within weeks, you get a quick reward for your labors. It also lets you grow unusual varieties that aren’t available in the shops. But success is in the vegetable garden planning. The most productive plots are those that are carefully thought out to ensure a steady supply of produce, either through successional vegetable garden planning and plantings, or by varying times. This avoids gluts of any one veg and extends the harvesting season of  the kitchen garden.

1. FORMAL KITCHEN GARDEN

A formal kitchen garden is neatly compartmentalized to fit a variety of  vegetables alongside soft fruit and flowers for cutting. There is an art to ensuring tall plants don’t overshadow long-growing ones. Any sunny wall or fence will provide shelter for space-saving fruit espaliers. Apples, pears, cherries or peaches grow well trained against a wall, which will aid ripening.

The small option of formal kitchen garden

• Construct a series of 120cm-square raised beds edged by low walls of wood, brick or stone.
• When you are thinking of the vegetable garden design, make sure each bed can easily be reached from all four sides without treading on the soil and compacting it.
• Planning vegetable garden, separate the beds with paths topped with gravel or bark chippings laid over a weed-proof membrane.
• Always make paths wide enough for pushing through with a wheelbarrow.
• Try to ‘double harvest’ in your kitchen garden root vegetables such as turnips, beets and kohlrabi. These also produce edible leaves – pick a few at a time from each plant before harvesting the root.

The large option of formal kitchen garden

Create a focal point of the kitchen garden with a central feature in the beds such as topiary, an obelisk, ornamental or a standard plant – medlars, bay trees or roses are good examples. 

Planning vegetable garden, break up the space with terracote forcing jars for rhubarb or run of traditional glass cloches that not only keep pests at bay, but also protect tender seedlings.

Thinking of vegetable garden design, plan for create an irrigation system through the beds. The larger the kitchen garden area, the more water is needed during prolonged dry spells, so direct rainwater from adjacent roofs into water butts and connect them to leaky plastic pipes laid through the beds.

2. Vertical kitchen garden design

Filling airspace in the kitchen garden is a clever way to fit in more plants, especially in a small vegetable garden. Peas, beans, cucumbers, marrows, squashes and courgettes are all good candidates for the vertical growing in the kitchen garden. Training plants upwards makes maximum use of a limited vegetable garden ground area and is useful where space is restricted. But do remember when you are doing vegetable garden planning, all vegetables need some light.

The structures

• The key to success in this vegetable garden design lies in support. The simplest structures are three or four-cane tripods that are traditionally hazel branches coppiced in spring.
• An effective technique of vegetable garden planning for peas is to sandwich a row of young pea plants between two rows of sticks running each side at 45º angle so they meet above the vegetable garden plants. Thread garden string through to add stability.
• Bean poles (either hazel sticks or bamboo canes) provide sturdy support for runner or broad beans. Cut in straight, two-meter lengths, then push into the soil – upright or at an angle – to create wingwams, arches or even a mini-pergola. Where poles meet, firmly tie with string or twine.

• Wooden obelisks in the kitchen garden will provide attractive and strong supports for gourds. Using thicker poles will suffice for courgettes.
• Taller versions, in wood or mental, draw sweet peas upwards, making attractive centerpieces to kitchen garden beds.

The plants

• Maximise your kitchen garden space and plant a fast-growing ‘cash crop’, such lettuce, in between a slower-growing main crop, such as sweet corn or broccoli: the lettuce is ready to harvest before the main crop matures, so does not disturb it.
• Place taller plants at the back of your vegetable garden so they won’t steal all the sunshine, then you can squeeze a row of a low-growing crop such as rocket, spring onion or radish between taller crops in the kitchen garden.
• Endive, radicchio or spinach are useful additions to a kitchen garden bed as they can cope even in partial shade.
• The higher a plant climbs, the more important it is to tie in the main steams with expandable kitchen garden ties.
• If the soil of your vegetable garden is supporting lots of tall growth, it will need additional water and nutrients and should be mulched well and fed regularly.

3. Container kitchen garden design

Many delicious vegetables, fruit and herbs can be grown from seed in the kitchen garden containers. The beauty of pot-grown veg is that, as each reaches maturity, it can be moved close to the kitchen for harvesting. Planning vegetable garden go for dramatic effect for chilli peppers and aubergines. Tomatoes make attractive patio plants and varieties such as “Tumbling Tom Red” grow well in hanging baskets.

The plants

• Strawberries, with their handsome foliage, grow well in layers in special, multi-holed terracotta planters.
• Thinking of vegetable garden design, grow potatoes or sweet potatoes in large canvas bads so they can be moved around. Barrels are good choice for a static spot.
• Keep a few smaller pots in your container kitchen garden of herbs or chives to fill gaps  in ornamental vegetable kitchen garden beds during the time it takes for each row to be harvested.
• Salad leaves are especially easy to cultivate in pots for your vegetable garden and the cut-and-come-again varieties regrow after snipping with scissors. Early sowing are ready to cut after about nine weeks; mid-season sowings after only six weeks.

The pots

• Terracotta and glazed pots are the most attractive for the kitchen garden design, but they do absorb water from the compost. To avoid this, line the inside of pots with plastic, piercing the base for drainage.
• Alternatively, plastic pots for the kitchen garden are inexpensive and easily moved around.
• Choosing large containers reduces the need to water.
• Root vegetables need deep containers – old chimney pots are ideal for planting carrots, while top heavy tomatoes need a weighty pot so they don’t topple over.
• Grow in your vegetable garden plant in a quality compost that is formulated for the purpose.
• Feed veg or fruit plants of your kitchen garden with a slow-release fertilizer.
• Provide plants with a sunny spot.
• Never let them dry out.
• To deter slugs and snails, spray round the base of kitchen garden pots with lubricating oil, raise them on feet and stand over gravel or egg shells.

4. Potager Garden

Potagers originated centuries ago as an arrangement of geometrically shaped garden beds edged with box and filled with vegetables, fruit and flowers. It is a versatile, adaptable kitchen garden design. As long as the original proportions of the vegetable garden are maintained, any kitchen garden design can be shrunk or enlarged to fit different sized or shaped vegetable gardens, but garden designs can also be as simple as four rectangular kitchen garden beds grouped around a centerpiece.

The structure

• The potager vegetable garden is a framework of crisply cut, low-growing hedges that delineate the vegetable garden beds. The hedges are most often created from dwarf or common varieties of box.
• A softer look of potager kitchen garden is achieved with lavender, which forms a compact, silver hedge topped in summer with long, fragrant spikes that attract bees and other insects.
• Clip bushes of your vegetable garden into shape in autumn and early spring so they don’t get straggly and woody.

The plants

• Potagers combine fruit, vegetables, flowers and herbs, not as rows, but planted according to a garden design so the colours, forms and textures of the garden plants are balanced and beautiful.
• Decorative forms of vegetables dominate, so go for frilly, red-leaved lettuces such as ‘Lollo Rosso’ or ‘Cerize’, purple sprouting broccoli, the glistening red, orange and golden stems of Swiss chard, or firm round cabbages in rich reds or subdued steely blues.

5. Cottage kitchen garden design

Cottage gardens evolved in the country as a practical solution to growing food in limited space kitchen gardens. At first glance, cottage kitchen garden design appears wayward, but behind the apparent randomness lies care to ensure plants do not overshadow one another and that the soil is kept healthy with homemade compost. Roses, clematis and self-seeding perennials are key elements in the cottage garden, with fennel, borage, sweet rocket, feverfew, aquilegias and foxgloves self-seeding year on year. The emphasis is on easy-going plants that are edible, medicinal and ornamental.

The vegetables

• Vegetables include asparagus which, once established in the kitchen garden, looks after itself, yielding tasty spears in late spring, followed by fern-like fronds that add foliage among flowers.
• Red orach is another beautiful favourite, its young leaves delicious in salads, while the mature leaves taste like spinach when cooked.
• A cold frame is invaluable for bringing on crinkly red lettuces, leeks or sweetcorn to fill any gaps.
• Grow in your vegetable garden seedlings in ‘pots’ crafted from newspaper, filled with soil and tied with jute string. Plant into beds and the paper rots down.

Easy access is essential so lay reclaimed terracotta tiles through the beds to avoid damaging plants.

The flowers

Beautiful flowers are also essential, especially those that are edible, too. Some species of da lily taste similar to crunchy lettuce and the petals from marigolds or bergamot add tangy flavours to salads as well as colour and fine textures.
For organically minded gardeners, companion vegetable garden planning and planting helps discourage pests. For example, nasturcuims sown alongside broccoli act as a sacrificial plant by diverting hungry aphids, while French marigolds, chives or parsley are good at luring greenfly away from tomato plants. Plant rosemary, thyme and lavender around fruit trees as they will attract bees for pollination.

-->