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The Vegetable Garden

One of my greatest joys in life is preparing a meal with ingredients I've grown in the garden. It is a thread that keeps me connected to nature and fellow gardeners both past and present.

So I am very excited about the work being done to establish the vegetable beds at the Garden Home Retreat. The design is inspired by the vegetable garden at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello. Jefferson carved a 1,000-foot long terrace out of the mountainside and divided the area into 24 plots where he could grow food for the house and experiment with new varieties.

A similar approach is being employed at the Garden Home Retreat, which is perched on top of a plateau with the garden area sloping down toward the river. Following the outlines of the old farm fields, two terraces have been established. The upper terrace will host herbaceous borders and the lower terrace will be devoted to vegetables, fruits and herbs.

Although my vegetable garden does not compare in size to Jefferson's, it is still a big area. But my method on any garden design project is to divide and conquer and I am employing this technique at the Retreat as well. By creating smaller spaces I can design each room individually rather than having to deal with a large blank canvas. It is very similar to creating the layout of a house. Imagine sketching out the floor plan of your dream home. In that same spirit, I?m laying out the floor plan of the garden.

Sketch of the Western Half of the Vegetable Garden

1. the fountain garden
2. holly hedge
3. asparagus beds
4. Walpole Old Fashioned Four Rail Farm Fence
5. 6' x 20' framed beds
6. Large 16' x 20' framed beds for sprawling varieties such as melons and squash
7. corridor carpeted in grass
8. small gardener's shed
9. espaliered apple trees trained on cables strung between two 6? x 6? cedar posts
10. A sandy soil mix topped with straw will serve as paths between the framed beds. Dense enough to roll a wheelbarrow over, but with good drainage.
11. narrow framed beds for annuals, good for cutting and for hiding the vegetable beds during down times.

I began by splitting the length of the terrace in half with a water fountain marking the center. This creates a central room that is somewhat like an entry hall or vestibule. To the left and right of the fountain garden are two ?wings? made up of a series of garden rooms that are accessed by a central ?corridor? or ?hallway,? which is really a wide grass path.

Because the terrace follows the contour of the hillside a slight curve prevents a full view from one end of the corridor to the next. Although not as dramatic as the garden rooms that encircle my home, there is still a sense of mystery of what lies just around the bend.

In each wing there are eight rooms that come off the central corridor. These rooms are further divided by beds framed in wood. I selected Western Red Cedar to frame the beds. This material contains a natural, rot resistant preservative that will keep the boards intact for many years to come. This is important because the beds are not really raised like the framed beds in my urban vegetable garden. In this case the cedar serves as a way to outline the perimeter of each area. The boards will be buried in the soil with only about an inch projecting above ground level. The boards are meant to define the bed space and hold amended soil, but they will not be above ground. I did this for esthetic reasons. A grouping of raised, framed beds creates a fairly formal look, even when the frames are wood. The geometric pattern calls to mind the grand parterre gardens typical of European estates. Sinking the frames gives the appearance of in ground crops, much closer to the American ornamental farm style that characterizes the Garden Home Retreat.

The beds will be outfitted with a drip irrigation system and surrounded by a mixture of sand and a soil amendment made of fired clay pellets called hydrocks. This will ensure that the area around the beds stays dry and compact. A lesson learned from years of slogging around between the framed beds at my in-town garden where the ground seems to always stay wet.

In that garden I have a hedge of boxwood that blocks the vegetable garden from view, because, lets face it, it doesn't always look picture perfect. At the Retreat a series of long narrow beds filled with annuals will run between the grass corridor and the framed beds acting somewhat like walls. These beds will shield the vegetables during down times, provide seasonal color, flowers for cutting and, hopefully, solve my constant dilemma of wanting to use up all my crop space for blooms.

Having more space is, in general, an exciting prospect. And while it is potentially overwhelming, when I put it on paper and break the area up into rooms, it becomes a more doable process. After weeks of doodling and drawing out ideas the hardest part was making the decision to stop dreaming and start building.