English Peas, Spring Onions and Roasted Almonds

Just cooked English peas, sautéd spring onions and roasted, salted almonds are a delicious combination of tender sweet, sweet pungent, and crunchy just salty. You can set this side dish next to grilled fish or chicken or mashed potatoes and a roast. It's...

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Making A Kitchen Garden Category Archive

Your Soil: Making the Kitchen Garden

The soil in your garden was created over thousands of years through the disintegration and decomposition of rock and organic matter. Temperature and rainfall, the life and death of plants, animals and bacteria and fungi, and the rocks that were there to begin with: all contributed to the soil you find in your garden today.

The principal components of soil are minerals, organic matter, air, and water. Soil minerals and organic matter make up the solid part of your soil. Air and water occupy the pore spaces between your soil’s solid particles. All of these provide nutrients, moisture, and anchorage for plants. Depending upon where you stand in your garden, these components are present in varying amounts.

The particles in your soil are many sizes and shapes. Coarse particles such as gravel and stones are not conducive to plant growth. Your garden can do without them. The soil particles that support plant growth are divided into three sizes: sand, silt, and clay. Sand particles are the largest of these three; the clay particles are the smallest.

The combination of sand, silt, and clay in your soil is called soil texture. Soil texture affects your soil’s fitness for growing plants, sometimes called tilth.

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Raised Beds: Making the Kitchen Garden

Consider a raised bed if you live in an area where the soil is rocky or mostly sand or mostly clay. Adding organic matter to your soil is always a good idea and will always help make poor soil better. But sometimes a raised bed is the best solution.

You can choose the soil in your raised bed. You can purchase rich garden soil at the garden center or you can make your own by taking native soil from nearby and amending it with well-rotted manure and compost until it is rich and loamy.

The soil in a raised bed warms more quickly in spring—that’s good in short season and cool coastal regions. A raised bed also can be made tall enough to aid a back tired after years of bending. And the width of a raised bed will allow you to work your vegetable bed from different sides.

A bed width of no more than 4 feet (1.2 m) will allow easy access from each side. You don’t have to worry about soil compaction with a raised bed. All of your gardening is done from the edge. You can bring a chair, stool, or wheelchair to the edge of a raised bed. The more narrow the bed, the easier it is to reach into the bed without having to lean on the soil.

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Kitchen Garden Location

A kitchen garden is—as its name suggests--a garden that is as close to the kitchen as it can be. A kitchen garden provides the cook ingredients that are fresh-picked and at their peak of ripeness—fruits, vegetables, herbs, and edible flowers.

Plan to use the produce from your kitchen garden immediately, at the very next meal. And when the next meal is not your immediate concern, you can use the ingredients from your kitchen garden to put-up produce for out-of-season meals. The kitchen garden allows you to plan and easily accomplish meals throughout the year that are seasonally tasty.

Easy and quick access to the kitchen is a key consideration when choosing the site for your kitchen garden. The closer your kitchen garden is to the kitchen door, the easier it will be for you to quickly prepare and cook the freshest ingredients.

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Kitchen Garden Size

How big should a kitchen garden be? Two more questions: How much space do you have? How much ground can you care for? A small garden that provides the vegetables you will eat is better than a vegetable plot that produces more than you can use or give away. A small garden that you can easily care for is better than a large garden that wears you out and leaves you discouraged.

A kitchen garden can be any size and any shape: square, rectangle, circle, half circle, any shape. Kitchen garden crops can be grown in containers or mixed among the flowers in a flowerbed. A garden as small as 3 feet square will offer you 9 square feet of garden; more than enough room for a salad garden, a tomato and basil garden, or a root or vegetable soup garden.

If you have never grown vegetables before or if your time is limited, start small. Make a short list of the vegetables you like to eat first. As you gain experience, grow more crops and grow the size of your garden if you like. Keep a kitchen garden notebook where you can record what you like and dislike, what works and what doesn’t. Aim to make your garden a little bit better every year and your kitchen garden enjoyment will follow.

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Vegetables In The Right Season

Planting vegetables in their right season will greatly enhance your harvest. Most vegetables belong to one of two seasonal groups: cool-season crops and warm-season crops.

The planting date for each vegetable depends upon the weather that the vegetable can best tolerate. Cool-season vegetables grow best in early spring or in late summer and autumn when the weather is cooler. Warm-season vegetables grow best during the late spring, summer, and early autumn when the weather is warm.

Cool-season crops must mature while the weather is cool otherwise they will go to seed. That means they are usually planted at the end of the warm season or the start of the cool season. Warm-season crops must be planted and begin to grow after the last frost or freeze of winter, and they must mature soon enough that they can be harvested before the first frost of the next cool season.

Of course, if the weather in your region is cool year-round, cool-weather crops will be well suited most of the year. And, if you live in tropical or subtropical region where the weather is seldom if ever cool, warm-weather crops are your best year-round choice.

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Planning Your Kitchen Garden

Many Harvest to Table readers have asked for tips on kitchen gardening. Over the past year and a half, I’ve written extensively about vegetables and fruits that you can find at the farm market or grow yourself. For the next several weeks, I will offer my insights into kitchen gardening. Check here twice each week to find the next set of kitchen garden tips. By early this summer, you will be bringing your harvest to table.

Planning a Kitchen Garden

Your kitchen garden should be close to your kitchen. It is a garden for the kitchen.

It can be small: just a few pots of herbs or salad vegetables. It can be a bed or two dedicated to the diversity of fruits and vegetables you eat every week or the food you like to give away to friends and neighbors. Your kitchen garden can be a converted flower bed bordering a fence or a hedge. Your kitchen garden can be a few edible flowers mixed with salad greens surrounding a fruit tree at the edge of the patio. Your kitchen garden can be a small raised bed with a comfortable bench right under your kitchen window.

Your kitchen garden will give you fresh and flavorful fruits, vegetables, herbs, and edible flowers. It will offer you ingredients at the peak of ripeness to be enjoyed minutes after harvest or first thing tomorrow. The kitchen garden will give you fruits and vegetables when they are the most tasty.

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