Kitchen Garden Blog

No kitchen garden is complete, I’d argue, without a very large quantity of fruit as well as vegetables.

I’m not sure what puts people off growing fruit - it’s ridiculously easy, especially if you compare it to, say, preventing spinach from bolting - yet it’s usually an afterthought, with the possible exception of strawberries. But just growing veg is like living life in black and white: you’re missing a whole other dimension to your gardening life.

Berries dripping with blood-red juice, apples still warm from the sun, pears so juicy you have to eat them over the sink: fruit in the garden is the definition of luxury. You can be as poor as a church mouse and still live like a king if you grow fruit. It brings out your romantic, indulgent side, making you generous to yourself and those closest to you with sumptuous treats and illicit excesses of crumbles and pies and tarts and icecream.

I’m gradually repopulating my garden with fruit, and so far things are going well: we have the annual treat of three trees’ worth of apples, and my previously ailing ‘Conference’ pear produced a bumper crop last year. I’ve begun work (slowly) on planting what I’m optimistically calling the orchard on top of the hill: so far, so pathetic, with just one medlar and one quince, but I’m adding more each year.

But the most exciting bit is starting this year. I have a little spit of land, about 5m by 7.5m (that’s 16 x 25ft to you oldies) between my greenhouse and the wall of the garage which doubles up as my garden shed. And it’s just the right size for a berry patch.

It’s roughly rectangular, so I fancied something a bit more formal this time. I knew I didn’t want the usual fruit cage; there’s nothing wrong with them, it’s just that I suffer from delusions of grandeur and I’m after a fruit cage that doesn’t look like a fruit cage. I’m thinking tall slender posts with copper pipes between them, and swags of rope from a central point to hold the netting up.

Inside, I had in mind a geometric design, rather like a potager. These are very easy to draw up, given a little graph paper and a pencil: I did mine on the kitchen table.

Yes, of course I could have just done the traditional thing and made beds either side of a central path. I’d probably have given myself a lot less hassle that way.

But though it may seem odd to be ‘designing’ a kitchen garden layout, actually it makes the whole space so much more inviting, interesting and just downright beautiful. And that means you want to be in it: which means your garden is loved and cherished in a way a practical but visually dull space is not.

There’s absolutely no reason why a kitchen garden can’t be just as well laid out as an ornamental one, and once you’ve taken that on board, the possibilities for growing fruit and veg become downright exciting.

There is just one rule for designing a garden, and that stays more or less the same whatever you’re doing: keep it simple, stupid. I began by drawing some complicated fiddly thing with a diamond in the middle but that left me with lots of funny triangular corner beds. Then I tried a rather grand design with a sweeping semi-circle at the back: nope, not enough width, and besides, it would have been a nightmare to build and obscured the garage window, which is kind of attractive.

Given that the entrance is over towards one corner, I had to have diagonal paths: I also wanted growing space all round the edges, as I’m planning espaliered cherry trees (perfect for growing under netting: the birds get the lot otherwise).

I also needed a central space for a raised bed, or maybe a pot, so I can grow blueberries: my soil is unrelentingly alkaline, and my favourite fruit is stubbornly acid-loving. So my only option is to put some in containers of ericaceous compost. Luckily they adapt well to container life.

My central higher posts (the ones the swags of ropes will hang from) also had to go in the middle: so that more or less set me off on the design.

Here (with apologies for the lousy quality of the drawing) is what I came up with.

Designing your garden – working through the practicalities of what must go where, how you’re going to get from A to B (and back again), how you will reach your plants and – most importantly of all – where you can fit in your favourites – is the first step to creating a successful outdoor space. Even if all you want are rows of rectangular beds, a drawing will help you work out how wide your paths will be, where the shed will go and what you’re going to put in the shady spot where nothing much will grow.

It’s so much better to think through all these things well before you start chopping your ground up and laying paths all over the place: mistakes, or just the realisation you’re going about it all the wrong way, are so much more easier to put right on paper. Take the time now, write it all down, and you’ve got a blueprint from which everything else follows – and you can watch your dream turn into reality.

Next month: time to get to work. I’ll be stripping back what’s there now and starting to put in the bones of the garden.

Tags: apples, berries, berry patch, blueberries, designing, drawing, Fruit, fruit cage, garden design, layout, medlar, orchards, paths, pears, quince