Planting the Kitchen Garden

If you have recently moved to a new home, you will have the luxury of starting your kitchen garden from scratch.  If your garden is already established, there is no need to uproot everything to grow your own produce.  Gardens need not be exclusively made up of just edible or just ornamental plants.  You may wish to start by planting your kitchen garden with a few annual vegetables and herbs among your ornamental plants.  You can easily incorporate edible plants into the garden by mixing fruit, vegetables and herbs in ornamental beds.  This planting arrangement avoids crops grown in visually uninspiring mono-cropped rows.

If you are planting vegetables in new beds, then they can be interplanted with ornamentals and herbs.  Fragrant plants such as English marigolds (Calendula), French marigolds (Tagetes patula) and oregano (Origanum) are excellent choices for attracting beneficial insects, and interplanting with plants such as these will help to keep pests to a minimum.  Large blocks of the same vegetable are likely to attract high concentrations of pests, whereas interplanting tends to confuse and dissuade them.

If you need to remove an ornamental tree or shrub that has died or outgrown its site, consider replacing it with a fruit-bearing tree or shrub.  There are many possibilities, including apples, currants, raspberries, crab apples, plums and cherries, which can all provide valuable colour and texture in the garden as well as a source of food.  Apart from feeding the household, excess fruit from these trees will also provide food for a range of birds and insects.
It is worthwhile researching the eventual height of plants in the planning stages.  Some will simply look out of place if they are grown in the wrong location, such a planting tall plants in front of smaller ones.  Many large plants will also need some form of staking or support.

When planting the kitchen garden remember that lettuce, chives, pansies and parsley create excellent borders along the edges of raised beds.  Tall plants such as dill, sunflowers, daylillies, fennel, valerian, peas and runner beans are best grown at the back of beds or at the centre of containers.  Provide trellis and other supports where needed.  Choose edible flowers such as nasturtiums and chives wherever possible because they are a natural addition to gardens and make salad bowls look and taste wonderful.

Strawberries are a very attractive crop because they produce fruit for most of the summer and tolerate marginal soils and light shade.  Large patches are likely to attract pests, so they should be interplanted with strong smelling herbs like thyme and oregano which also form good groundcover.

In the kitchen garden plants can be used in a number of imaginative ways.  Instead of erecting plain wooden fencing or mesh barriers you could plant a living one.  Gooseberries, raspberries or currents are readily trained along a fence and apples can be trained as an espalier cordon or fan along a wall.  Climbing plants such as hardy kiwi fruits, trailing nasturtiums, broad beans or sugar snap peas can all be grown over a fence or trellis to provide an ornate screen.  Hedges can also form useful and attractive edible barriers.  Shrub roses such as Rosa rugosa, create an attractive, but impenetrable barrier, producing large red rose hips that contain 60 times the vitamin C of orange.  The hips can be used to make tea, jam, syrup or jelly.  Currants and other fruit can also be planted on the sunny side.

When designing your kitchen garden, bear in mind that the garden is for everyone and try to involve the entire family in the planning and design of the kitchen garden.