Starting your vegetable garden

Xavier Mathias and Les Cahiers du Potager Bio tell us about

Design your organic vegetable garden.

Designing a vegetable garden is fine, but why specify organic? A priori, a vegetable garden remains a vegetable garden, whether it is managed with natural or chemical methods. However, organic growing methods, beyond the simple framework of the specifications that govern them, require, for satisfactory results, more than a simple I do not use chemicals. I take this opportunity to recall this principle dear to Sébastien: Growing organically does not consist of removing from your garden shelf products containing chemical molecules to replace them with other so-called "natural" ones, stamped Authorized in Organic Agriculture. This drift towards organic consumerism is also interesting to look at a little more closely. I imagine that Henri Lemaire and other pioneers of organic farming would be surprised if they saw these shelves of organic products in specialized garden supermarkets. These thousands of plastic bottles of all shapes and sizes, in garish colors (it's called marketing, apparently) with ultimately exactly the same way of approaching the vegetable garden as in conventional agriculture: for each difficulty encountered there is a solution in powder, spray, to spread etc. The objective of this file is precisely to show that this is not what organic farming is all about. It is not about being naive, or making people believe that everything will happen "for the best in the best of all possible worlds" without pests or diseases by the simple magic of a restored natural balance, but to try to return to simple and just common sense in our vegetable gardens. The one which consists first of all in realizing that we are not here to contribute to further increasing the chemical pollution that surrounds us, others do it very well and with the blessing of successive public authorities, but to have fun, to find simple gestures without putting anyone in danger.

Choosing a location. What size?

Not that I consider all readers of the notebooks to be wealthy landowners with large areas to develop, lost when it comes to choosing from a vast plot. However, for some, the question arises, and the choice of location is crucial to the success of the vegetable garden.

As far as possible, it should be as close to home as possible for obvious practical reasons, but also to easily enjoy the simple pleasure of walking there sometimes. Taking a quick stroll in the evening, for example, without any specific task to accomplish, also allows you to look at it differently, to see the improvements that need to be made, which are immediately obvious at those times.

There are almost no vegetables, and very few aromatic plants, that grow in the shade. At best, a few appreciate partial shade, but rarely anything beyond that. The chosen location must therefore be well exposed, not in the shade of a neighboring building or large trees. A vegetable garden installed under or near an orchard of tall trees is absolutely to be avoided. Between the shade of the trees, and the inevitable "food" competition, the unfortunate vegetables won't have the slightest chance of surviving.

For those lucky enough to already have a garden enclosed by hedges or walls, these natural "barriers" have an exceptionally positive effect on the vegetable garden. Wind barriers, thermal buffers, and heat storage—their benefits are numerous.

Be careful not to bite off more than you can chew when determining the area dedicated to the vegetable garden. Not that it is a colossal task, but like practicing a musical instrument, it requires a lot of regularity. Thus, you have to plan according to a changing lifestyle. Between weekends and holidays, it is common to go away more and more, even if the cost of fuel may reverse this trend, and upon returning, finding a vegetable garden full of grass with crops lost due to not having been picked on time is often discouraging. Traditionally, it is estimated that for a family of 4 who want to produce all their vegetables, including storage potatoes and asparagus, you need 500m², while 200m² is enough for a good production of early vegetables, summer vegetables and some roots to store. However, having observed it, a gardener after a few seasons of experience can, on a well-managed surface of 100m², have quite impressive harvests.

A living environment

Completely plowed from autumn onwards, bare as on the first day except for a few cabbages and leeks, the other half of the year filled with vegetables and impeccably weeded (chemically if necessary) right up to the fence, many of our grandparents' vegetable gardens did not encourage daydreaming! If they were unattractive places for humans, they were also for auxiliaries (hedgehogs, ladybugs, hoverflies, etc.) who found no refuge there to set up their nest, while pests (aphids, white butterflies, etc.) delighted in such a place composed solely of the plants to which they are attached. This is why it is essential to try to bring a little balance. We must not forget that cultivating means upsetting a balance that existed in a hectic way before the passage of the spade or the cultivator. Hedges, a pond, or even a simple buried basin are almost essential near the vegetable garden. Having experienced it, I can assure you that it is quite impressive to see how quickly a small pond "comes to life". A few months after being dug, frogs, dragonflies, etc. are already having a whale of a time. It is obvious that you cannot dig a pond in many modestly sized gardens. Small, ready-to-install molded ponds, in multiple shapes and sizes, allow you to have a small watering hole at low cost, where birds and other garden inhabitants will come to drink or frolic.

Be careful when talking about hedges to be talking about the same thing. As with our unfortunate vegetables, hedges have been victims of an incredible standardization. Thus, they are not these absurd walls of plant concrete most often made from Leyland Cypress, but a set of different species adapted to the local climate and soil. To make your choice, the simplest thing is to look around your home for trees that seem well adapted, with good growth