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When I began gardening, I dreamed of making a kitchen garden where I’d plant vegetables, fruits, greens and herbs. I hoped that kitchen gardening would connect me to our country’s agricultural cultural heritage, a tradition I feel particularly tied to as my garden is in Connecticut, one of the nation’s first 13 colonies.
I imagined well-ordered rows of lettuce or spring peas ready to pick, and I hoped to re-create a feeling summed up by the American food writer M.F.K. Fisher. “The best way to eat fresh [peas] is to be alive on the right day,” she wrote, “with the men picking and women shelling, and everybody capering in the sweet early summer weather, and the big pot of water boiling, and the table set with little cool roasted chickens and pitchers of white wine.”
Those words capture what I wanted my kitchen garden to create: proximity between food and land; the camaraderie of loved ones cooking and eating together; and the delight of sharing what I’d grown. My favorite gifts to receive from friends have always been homegrown, whether it’s syrup from a maple tree or just-collected eggs from a chicken coop. I thought a kitchen garden would help me give similar gifts, in the form of brown paper bags filled with fresh produce.
I drew inspiration from French kitchen gardens, known as potager. The French applied the principles of garden design — rhythm, line, texture and color — to vegetable gardens. The resulting gardens are anything but utilitarian; instead they are a joy to look at while also being productive. “There is nothing simpler, nor more beautiful, than a kitchen garden,” concluded Saint Ignatius. “It is not enough to cultivate vegetables with care. You have the duty to arrange them according to their colors, and to frame them with flowers, so they appear like a well-laid table.”
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Duty or not, in gardening books, it’s the photographs of kitchen gardens that most catch my eye, both for their precision and their beauty. I like neatness, order and design. I like seeing the lush vegetables organized into clean lines. I’ve brought those qualities into my garden, with its ordered rows of fruits and vegetables.
All kitchen gardens — whether potagers or windowsill pots — offer the joy of consuming what you grow. Our culture increasingly puts an emphasis on understanding our food’s provenance — Where did it come from? Who grew it? What was used in the planting? When you grow what you consume, the answers to those questions are right at hand.
In my experience, the work of gardening enhances the taste of the produce and expands my culinary palate. On the recommendation of one of my gardening mentors, Gaye Parise, for example, I planted white turnips. I neither cook turnips nor order them at restaurants. But once they grew in my garden, I made them into a puree that I found surprisingly delicious.
The American novelist C. Dudley Warner observed something similar about his homegrown vegetables. “The squash has always been to me a dish of contempt; but I eat it now as if it were my best friend,” he wrote. “I never cared for the beet or the bean; but I fancy now that I could eat them all, tops and all, so completely have they been transformed by the soil in which they grew. I think the squash is less squashy, and the beet has a deeper hue of rose, for my care of them.”
Growing my own produce also has allowed me to reflect on food’s seasonality. We are accustomed to eating any fruit or vegetable at just about any time of the year, thanks to well-stocked grocery stores. But that’s a relatively recent phenomenon. Eating from my kitchen garden reminds me that fruits and vegetables thrive in particular seasons and places. “Nature created the most beautiful recipe book in the world,” the Michelin-starred chef Alain Passard noted, “and it changes every three months.”
Kitchen gardens are also accessible to many; unlike trees or bushes, they can be sustained in small spaces. As someone who has lived in cities for much of my life, I wish I had thought about this sooner. I might have planted basil or oregano in a small pot on a fire escape. All you need is a few seeds and the desire to nurture them.
“The man who has planted a garden feels that he has done something for the good of the world. He belongs to the producers,” wrote Warner. “It is a pleasure to eat of the fruit of one’s toil, if it be nothing more than a head of lettuce or an ear of corn.” Warner’s words become vivid to me when walking between the trim rows of lettuce beds in my kitchen garden — because it’s then that I feel the connection to the land’s nourishing plants, the satisfying toil of bringing them to life and the pride of being among the producers.
Catie Marron is the author of “Becoming a Gardener: What Reading and Digging Taught Me About Living.” Find her on Instagram @catiemarron.
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