Edible French Garden. Rosalind Creasy
endive varieties develop a light heart without extensive blanching. In France you can still see boards stretched across the tops of curly endive rows a few weeks before harvest. Using boards is a simple but effective way to blanch the centers of these endives.
To blanch asparagus, you need to plan a few years in advance. First plant your asparagus bed much deeper than you would ordinarily—twelve to eighteen inches deep instead of the usual six to eight inches. Then you'll have to wait two years for the plants to mature. To blanch the asparagus, in the spring before the shoots have come out of the ground, mound up three or four inches of earth or sand around the area; when the tip comes up through the soil, reach down into the soil and cut off the shoot six or eight inches below the soil line. The shoot you take out will be perfectly white.
Serve these blanched vegetables with ceremony and give them special treatment. Most have quite a mild flavor and are best featured with light sauces and, because they are so tender, short cooking times. Imagine the luxury of sitting down to a dinner of thick, white, fresh asparagus spears and a salad filled with tender, succulent frilly endive.
Before blanching most radicchio plants are mostly green, not red.
After cutting back, new heads of radicchios are starting to emerge. Many modern radicchios produce tight red heads without this process.
french garden style
In France the home vegetable garden is alive and well. The government estimated in 1994 that 23 percent of the produce consumed in France was grown in home gardens. Most of these edible gardens are what are loosely called potager gardens. Characteristically they are small patches of different kinds of vegetables and are grown through most of the year. Many of the varieties grown in these gardens are of French origin, but predictably, as the world of seed production and communication becomes increasingly global, the French gardener is growing seeds from many countries, including the United States.
Although many French gardens are mostly utilitarian, there is a long tradition of ornamental edible gardening in France, and it is experiencing a revival. Sometimes these beautiful gardens are exuberant informal vegetable and flower gardens; other times they are formal geometric gardens in the French parterre style. The tradition of growing edibles in a formal setting comes from the classic formal monastery gardens of the Middle Ages, where monks tended walled gardens in which the beds were laid out in geometric shapes filled with vegetables and fruits for the table, herbs for seasonings and medicine, and flowers for the altar. Years later the parterre evolved into a strictly ornamental garden design, and edibles were relegated to their own walled area. A tour of French chateau gardens today reveals that while many edible gardens are still walled off and many are quite informal, there are a number of famous edible parterre gardens, the most renowned of which is the breathtaking garden at Chateau de Villandry. If you wish to learn more about French edible garden styles, the book The Art of French Vegetable Gardening by Louisa Jones is most helpful, providing lovely photos of many French gardens, listing plants for edging the beds, and explaining how to feature different vegetables in the beds.
The large dramatic fronds of artichokes, the red and chartreuse foliage of chard, and neat rows of celeriac line the beds at Chateau de Villandry. In classic parterre style, each bed is outlined in clipped boxwood.
To help you design and plan your own French vegetable garden, I had some wonderful gardeners grow prototype French gardens for me so we could describe the process. (In addition, I've included photos of some of my French edible gardens.) The first garden is the Brennan/Glenn potager, grown in California; the other, in the parterre style, is the Will garden in New Jersey. For comprehensive information on starting a vegetable garden, soil preparation, and maintenance, see Appendix A (page 92). For detailed pest and disease information, see Appendix B (page 98).
Brennan/Glenn Potager Garden
A number of years ago I approached Georgeanne Brennan and Charlotte Glenn, then owners of Le Marche, a seed company that carried numerous French varieties. Both had spent much time in France seeking out special varieties and recipes, and Georgeanne even lives in her farmhouse in Provence off and on. I asked them to grow a French prototype garden for me, and they agreed enthusiastically and decided that it would be most typically French to grow a potager garden. Potage is the French word for "soup," and in a gardening context a potager is a garden containing whatever is necessary for soup at any time during the year. Traditionally, the potager garden is planned in little three- or four-foot-square or rectangular plots, which rotate with the seasons, along with a nursery area for young seedlings.
Georgeanne and Charlotte's potager garden was duly planned; I remained in touch throughout the spring and in late June went out to visit the garden near Davis, California. Georgeanne welcomed me and gave me a thorough briefing on the garden before showing me around. She explained that for centuries the potager had been part of most French families' lives, whether in the country or the city. "When I first lived in France," she told me, "it was to me an absolutely astonishing idea that everything I needed was right there in the garden. In fact, this was necessary, because there weren't any stores nearby. But it was tremendously enjoyable as well. Part of the daily experience was to go out in the morning and pick whatever I was going to have for the noon meal. Then in the evening I would go out and choose vegetables for the evening meal. The light and sounds would all be different. Those daily vegetable gatherings slowed the whole day down."
Georgeanne Brennan sows a new bed of beans in the potager garden in Sacramento, California. Small plantings planted in succession are well suited to fresh eating.
The point of the potager garden is to make available a continuous harvest. This means that you are continually starting seedlings to fill in spaces as they appear in the beds. Sometimes, as with carrots and beets, you begin the seedlings in the beds themselves, but you start most vegetables (for better supervision) in the nursery area or in flats or cold frames. You then transplant seedlings into the beds. As Georgeanne put it, "This garden fits into your life; it doesn't dominate it. Once the garden area is prepared, an average of twenty minutes a day is required to keep it up."
Cooking from the potager garden varies both seasonally and regionally. "When you drive through the mountain villages in July," said Georgeanne, "you will see beautiful leeks and cabbages, but three hundred kilometers to the south ripening tomatoes and eggplants appear. The regions differ that distinctively." In the United States, too, such gardens vary from place to place. Thus, if you live in a cold climate, to maintain a continuous harvest, you need to use row covers and cold frames for protection, and you have to mulch heavily in the fall. Such a garden would actually be similar to those in northern France. On the other hand, if you live in a mild climate, chances are your summer garden would resemble a Mediterranean French garden.
I enjoy driving through the French countryside with an eye out for home gardens. The crops in this fall garden include chicories, New Zealand spinach, yellow zucchinis, carrots, fennel, and brussels sprout
The potager garden was grown near Sacramento, California, on the edge of the great Central Valley. Summer temperatures in this part of the country are high, often hovering at 100°F for many days. The winters are mild and seldom dip below the mid-twenties. Therefore, heat is the major gardening problem. When summer really moves in, it is too hot to start lettuce, and if you want to start fall and winter crops, you