About Our Kitchen Gardens

The kitchen gardens not only provide us with all our fruit and vegetables for the year but they are also a source of joy and inspiration. We are hardly self sufficient, but we are working on developing a more sustainable life and learning the crafts and skills necessary to work the land and live from its produce. If you want to know more about what this land is like, the type of soil and climate we have go to About this Land.


Image Laura tending the vegetables in the potager

The kitchen gardens are really my area. Rachel does plenty of other things elsewhere on the land but leaves the food producing to me. I've been raised in a family of vegetable growers, which has obviously rubbed off. Growing edible or useful crops is an obsession and one of the many reasons we came here was to find enough land to really experiment with growing our own food.

I have learned such a lot about edible plants and their cultivation here. Often by trial and error and always by watching how nature works and how plants behave. We have been very lucky to have the expert guidance of our near neighbours, who were market gardeners before they came here. Our neighbours, always encouraging and interested in what new experiments I've got going in the garden, have doubed me pouce vert or green thumb.


The vegetable gardens and orchards are sited below the house on terraces, supported by dry stone walls, facing south and south west. We have four growing areas as well as orchard fruit and nut trees dotted around the mountainside. Because we live on a mountain and there is not much flat land each growing area feels, and is, quite distinct and some areas are quite far apart so we have ended up giving them names, if only to communicate to each other where we are headed, where a food stuff is to be located or what area has been watered.

The Herbage

Image The Herbage February 2008
The Herbage, or lettuce sanctuary, was built in the autumn of 2007 as a walk in salad bar which would protect all our delicate crops from the wild pigs and other animals.  It has a small 5ft by 8ft growing area within a steel frame and mesh cage that is attached to the house and was once a chicken coup. It is home to a small selection of quick growing lettuces, aromatic leaves and herbs. It also has lighting, which is great because you can just pop out, even in the pitch dark, when you realise you've forgotten to bring back that essential herb for the pot. Behind the Herbage is my new potting shed, complete with a plumbed in sink, that too was part of the old chicken coop. It is not quite finished as we are building a retaining wall and raised planting area to grow a full selection of herbs for the kitchen.

Image The Herbage with the first planting of winter lettuces, chicories endives and herbs, October 2007.

The Polytunnel

Image The polytunnel in summer 2007, brimming with delicious vegetables and herbs.
The polytunnel was set up in August 2006 and it is pretty big, standing 8ft (2.9m) tall 15ft (4.5m) across and a whacking 50ft (16.4m) long . One side of the tunnel is balanced on a dry stone retaining wall giving it the extra height. The wall provides a gentle heat source, radiating the heat that has been stored in the stone during the day back out at night. The growing area is divided into two long beds running down the full length of either side of the tunnel with a wide central pathway covered in horticultural membrane. The beds are slightly raised and retained by wooden planks, which makes the whole thing very manageable, easy to water, harvest and grow crops.
I could have just had the whole area flat soil but just I fancied having a neat little bit of growing area carved out of our 8 hectares of sauvage land. In winter this place comes into its own and not just for the plants, it is a little haven for gardeners too. I've got a table and benches in there and spend hours in the winter months writing up notes or having cups of hot tea. In spring it gives delicate crops an early start, in summer if it not too hot, peppers, cucumbers, aubergines and exotic herbs flourish and in winter it becomes a living walk in larder full of lettuces, oriental greens, herbs, carrots, onions, radishes, spinach held in their prime just ready for picking.

The Potager

Image: The Yorkshire Wall, a freestanding drystone wall protecting the potager
Work began on the potager in spring 2006 when the Yorkshire wallers came over for a spot of dry stone walling. The first thing they built was a beautiful freestanding wall around one end of what would be the potager. That was the start i needed, previously the land dry stone walls were in such disrepair that it seemed a daunting task. I had tried growing a little patch of stuff on this terrace the previous year but the wild pigs managed to get in a trash the crops. But once the wall was up the area became more protected and I started cultivating it. The first year was very poor because the soil is very shallow sandy and acidic over schist rock. I had to use a pole breaker in parts to take out some of the rock in order to get a deeper soil. But the beauty of a place like this that everything is used; the rocks and stones that were excavated from the growing area were used to make a retaining wall . It had previously just been wild and was full of some pretty annoying weeds and the grassland meant there were a lot of leather jackets in the soil. But as the soil fertility is built up each year it will become easier and easier to cultivate this area.

stone steps and retaining dry stone wall to the potager

The Veg Patch
I started with just this space when we first came here in 2004. It was already fenced in having been used as a donkey pen, which meant the soil must have had fair bit of manure in it.  The 35 x 25 foot enclosed area was divided into a series of raised beds to make crop rotation and tailored cultivation easier. It has been intensively cultivated for the last 4 years and the soil is in super condition. Next year it will become a permanent asparagus bed and soft fruit garden but meanwhile it is host to some of the winter vegetables. Most of the crops in the veg patch will be permanents with a little room given over to isolate annual plants for seed production.

Productive vegetable beds in the veg patch.

Read more about Why our Garden is Organic or how the garden has developed over the years in Gardener's Review

Note I have had the change the text on this page from an inclusive we to a singular I because Rachel kept getting people coming up to her and asking about the veg or a gardening question, so heads up lay off, she can't even identify the veg in the garden never mind how to grow them.

Helping in the Kitchen Gardens and on the land

There is a lot of work to be done here and, sometimes while Rachel has to work on income raising projects, I need help on the land so we occassionally host volunteers to help with the various jobs through the year.  &n bsp;Find out about helping at Mas du Diable.