Your Small Kitchen Garden

Are you thinking of starting a small kitchen garden… or about making changes to one you’ve already established? I have one single best and most useful tip for you: get to know other people with home kitchen gardens. Especially if you’re contemplating your first garden and you have no experience, become someone’s apprentice. Find a kitchen garden you like, and ask its owner to let you help with prepping, planting, maintenance, harvesting, and putting everything to bed for the winter (if that’s common practice in your hardiness zone).

But don’t stop with a single gardener. Even if you have a lot of gardening experience, get to know several kitchen gardeners and really explore what they do. You’ll find about as many great tips and techniques as you can find gardeners… you might discover an approach that defies your wisdom, yet solves problems you’ve skirted for years.

A Home Kitchen Garden Tour

Here’s another invaluable tip for every gardener: tour as many home kitchen gardens as you can, and think hard about what you see. Don’t have time to tour a dozen or more gardens? Don’t know where to find so many gardens to tour? No problem!

There’s a “group pool” on flickr.com called Edible Landscapes. Members of this pool have uploaded photographs of kitchen gardens, and there’s a lot of variety: traditional gardens, raised beds, container gardening, wall gardening… you’re bound to see something to get your creative juices flowing. Before you commit to new plans for your small kitchen garden, run this flickr slideshow, and take a garden tour:

Technorati Tags: design, plan, planning