Kitchen garden

"Called kailyards in Scotland and known as potagers in France (sounds fancy, right?), a kitchen garden is a place connected with your kitchen and everyday life. It's a distinct area of your home and landscape where vegetables, fruits, and herbs are grown for culinary use. A kitchen garden can be as small as a collection of or it can be as large as a formal stone garden that covers hundreds of square feet. No matter the size, the purpose is the same: a garden that's tended regularly and used frequently in everyday meals. ... At the very least, kitchen gardens can provide all the herbs you'll need year-round (either cut fresh or dried and stored). Beyond that, kitchen gardens can yield most the greens you and your family eat. And greater still, kitchen gardens can provide large amounts of beans, peppers, squash, cucumbers, and other fresh vegetable in the height of their season as well as opportunity for preserved foods for even the coldest winters."

"In breaking up a piece of grass land, you have at least the advantage of your idea of what a kitchen garden should be. You can make your boundaries and walks, and the forms and sizes of the several plots and plantations in accordance with your own theory of a perfect garden, so far at least as the extent of the grounds, the nature of the soil, and other inevitable conditions will allow. Now in this case the two matters of vital importance are the boundaries and the drainage."

"The vegetable garden has a long timeline and a curious history, quite as compelling as that of any . And with world famous kitchen gardens such as , the home of the American president Thomas Jefferson, in Virginia; in Cornwall; Winston Churchill's in Kent; and in France, home grown vegetables have become as fashionable as they are fresh."

"... “,” … —a documentary miniseries produced, in 1987, for — … had been something of a sensation at the time of its release. It follows a master gardener, , through his yearlong attempt to revive the long-fallow walled garden of , a country estate in , using entirely Victorian-era plants, tools, and methods. Each of the series’ thirteen parts (an introductory episode, and then one for each calendar month, January through December) is narrated, on- and offscreen, by Peter Thoday, a mustachioed horticulturist whose elbow-patched tweeds and air of perpetual wonderment harmonize wonderfully with Dodson, a plainspoken sixty-something man with cheeks as pink as rhubarb, who drops his “H”s and works the soil in a shirt and tie."