The return of the kitchen garden

This summer - if we can dare call it a summer yet - I’m noticing how many people are planting vegetables out in their gardens. There’s a house near me that has packed its front garden full of onions, cabbages, beans, potatoes and tomatoes - even sweetcorn. And for my money the results look much nicer than most of Hove’s cooler gardens, packed as they are full of strangely pointy architectural plants. It looks so lush compared to most of the more austere designer gardens of the moment.

Now I’m a flat-dweller, so this isn’t a phenonomenon I’m included in on, but something is definitely going on here. People are digging up their lawns and planting courgettes instead, or raising chickens. There’s a kind of chic Blitz spirit at large among us among us. Partly it’s rising food prices, partly it’s the ultimate way to go local and fresh, but either way the kitchen garden is making a big comeback and I’m all for it.

And here, at this year’s Chelsea Flower Show, is a prime example the new DIY veg zeitgeist. It’s the Daylesford Organic “Summer Solstice” Garden designed by Del Buono Gazerwitz Ltd. They describe it as:

An organic agrarian garden, linking a green wheat field flanked by native trees and wetland ditching, to a sheltered potager for the new century. Kitchen garden becomes ????garden kitchen??€???? with an architectural green-roofed building where what is grown is prepared for dining outside. The planting is native and naturalised, and seasonal for the solstice. The garden is intended to demonstrate that the demands of organic practice, conservation, sustainability and self-sufficiency can be strengths, not limitation, in contemporary design.

As soon as they scale it down for window boxes, I’ll I’ll join in.

Thanks to Hichako for the photograph of parsley, and myurbanfarm.com and ecohappy for the tip.

 Blogmemes  |   Del.icio.us  |   Digg  |   Furl  |   Google  |  Netscape  |   PlugIM  |   Reddit  |   Squidoo  |   StumbleUpon  |   Technorati  |   Yahoo My Web

This entry was written by Nigel and posted on Monday, May 19th, 2008 at 4:18 pm and filed under Good things to do, Green food. Bookmark the permalink. You can follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment, or trackback from your own site.

---