DIY Kitchen Garden Containers
Sometimes it's better not to ask why. I was reminded of this while touring the eighth annual Festival des Jardins, a garden festival held at Chateau de Chaumont in France's Loire Valley. The theme of the festival varies from year to year, last year's theme was Kitchen Garden. "Rien Que des Potagers" (Nothing but vegetable gardens) consisted of 30 individual garden plots, each designed by a different gardener, chosen from around 300 competitors who participated in an international competition.
The festival takes place on a bluff above the Loire River on the grounds of a palace once owned by Catherine de Medici. Today the château, which overlooks the village of Chaumont-sur-Loire, is home to an acclaimed conservatory whose students and apprentices help build and maintain the festival gardens.
I didn't know what to expect. I thought I'd find some kitchen gardening techniques that are less known in North America. What I found instead was 90 percent fantasy and 10 percent practical. Garden after garden pushed the limits of what a food garden could be. A whimsical and brightly colored children's garden, a Scottish garden, a tartan-plaited garden, a garden covered in snow by a steam jet, a water garden inside a plastic tent, a Zen garden supported by bamboo poles, and even a Zen garden without vegetables. Everything. I searched and searched for practical lessons, then I stopped looking and surrendered to the dreamlike spirit of the place.
Together, the gardens worked their magic on me. I'm 100 percent inspired, not necessarily to replicate any fanciful designs but to take a fresh look at my own garden and my own ideas of what a garden is, to see where I can expand the possibilities.
The concept of container gardening has been interpreted in many ways, sometimes with pots or beds or enclosures, which one might properly call containers, and sometimes conceptually, with designs that inspire interest in growing vegetables. Over the next few pages, I want to show you some of my favorites.
Vegetable garden Tips 👇
Barrels with a twist
In the festival garden "Caspadio Andaluz," inspired by the colors of Spain, olive oil drums, the tops of their metal sides cut into ribbons, are twisted to support tomatoes and squash. Most of the drums sat in a shallow reflecting pool near a long, south-facing, whitewashed wall, the better to reflect light. The northern face of the wall is painted dark blue. As the festival gardens at Chaumont-Sur Loire are clear, your choice of plant containers is only limited by your imagination. Here, olive oil drums are twisted to form plant supports.
Raised metal boxes
A festival garden consisted of a nine-square grid of eight approximately 3-foot-square metal planter boxes, each conveniently raised on counter-height metal legs, and a solid-sided metal box of the same size that served as a compost bin. Each garden box was divided into nine squares, making it easy to separate the plantings. The neat thing about the squares is the variety of attachments that can be screwed to the sides of the planters in endless combinations: mesh trellises for tomatoes, metal screens to shade delicate greens, and fixed and movable glass to create a greenhouse effect. I also thought the clear plastic plant labels with crisp, white lettering (seen throughout the festival) were really cool.
Special Garden Tips 👇
Recycled planters
A garden called "Grandfather's Thingummy" is about pleasure, simplicity, peace, relaxation, and recycling. Almost everything was converted into a container for planting: various long round metal pipes, some kind of black plastic pipes, zinc gutters, tiles, bottles, and boxes.
Even the otherwise ordinary terra-cotta pots were given a new look by being arranged in a suspended triangle of wire netting, thus serving as shade for the plants growing in the bed below. Mesh bags hanging from the fence in the back were filled with soil and were planting pots. Glass bottles in front keep out snails. According to the sign in the garden, "A snail feast is made with snails caught in the field fed on thyme."
Floating garden canoes
Have you run out of land for your kitchen garden and still have a pool or pond? Why not float your garden on reed boats? Your plants grow hydroponically and do not require watering. Be sure to carry a long stick if the crop you want to harvest is floating at the bottom of the pond. According to the sign in this garden, designed by conservatory practitioners, each raft is planted with a well-known soup ingredient, although I was hard-pressed to identify the reed planters floating by.
Garden Tips for you 👇
Cabbage bins
A garden inspired by the story of the three pigs consisted of three small garden cabins made of straw-like reeds, wood, and sheet metal, which isn't quite right, but you get the idea. The metal house had cabbages planted in black plastic buckets, each with its own watering can. The cans, in turn, were delivered through a tube.
Pumpkin Ham
One of the eye-catching sights at the festival has to be the series of pumpkins suspended by arched netting. Each pumpkin vine was trained on a metal pole, and its individual fruit was securely netted. Pumpkins, in a Lilliputian garden world ("hills of parsley, valleys of greens, rivers of oregano"), represent the sun's daily course. By the time I arrived in September, some of the live pumpkins had been replaced by stand-ins, but new vines had gone up the poles, and the dot was done.
Urban Drums
In one garden, painted oil drums are used as planters, framed by rough, back-alley fencing and graffitied heavy iron plates to show the possibilities of kitchen gardening even in the inner city. A great way to heat up the garden and reduce weeds.
Almost traditional
A permanent conservatory garden, next to the festival grounds, has palletized crates that serve as planters and beds formed of wattle woven with saplings and iron bars. It's a sleek and timeless look and a great counterpoint to a festival that never fails to push the envelope.
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