Ghosts of potagers past: California

As I ask myself various questions around my future courtyard garden plans, more than one of the answers start with, “It depends what I decide about the potager ... .” Between that ongoing discussion and dipping into Homegrown lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about my previous vegetable gardens and thought the middle of December might be a good time to show them to you! And share some of what they’ve taught me. There have been three potagers in my past but we’ll only visit two here, since there are effectively no photos of the first one. Suffice to say that was in my very first garden, behind a little rented house in the town of Napa, and consisted of a hodgepodge of half-barrels and pots with various things sticking out of them. But while it wasn’t picturesque, I grew amazing vegetables there, including the best carrots I’ve ever tasted in my life. So lesson #1 was that looks don’t really matter — it’s worthwhile to grow what you can where you can, in whatever you can, even if that’s a single pot of lettuces on a stoop.

That said, in my opinion there are few things in the world more visually appealing than a tidily arranged, abundantly planted kitchen garden, and I had dreamt of having one long before I ever tried my hand at gardening. I have copious tearsheets of beauties, collected over decades, and lots more inspiring photos pinned on Pinterest over the years. So when we found ourselves in possession of a big overgrown mess behind the house we moved to after Napa, my very first thought was about where my vegetable garden would go. And that’s the one I’ll show you today—

CALIFORNIA KITCHEN GARDEN

When I say overgrown mess, I’m understating the situation, as you can see above. It was bad when we got there and had gotten worse while we did first things first. I honestly didn’t know quite how bad an untended lot could become before I took responsibility for this one. And I paid for letting it get worse with days and weekends of my life on my knees separating trash from weeds and removing both. But eventually we got it cleared and leveled.

My husband made the L-shaped bed in the corner using rocks found beneath the overgrowth. That’s a little plum tree peeking in from the right edge of the photo, which we found engulfed in a giant shrub of some kind, and we had three more fruit trees: lemon, persimmon (which the squirrels always got) and Saturn peach. I was apparently so eager to get vegetables going that I planted the raised beds — which we just made from 8 planks from the hardware store nailed together, with rebar pounded in at the corners — before we even got the gravel down. But gravel we did.

We also added supports and chicken wire for the morning glory on the back fence to climb even higher. I unapologetically love morning glory, and it was so beautiful when that all filled in.

The rock bed was 2.5' or 3' deep and only got enough sun for vegetables along the one side of the L, so that was maybe 25 sq ft of planting space. I’m pretty sure the raised beds were 6' square, so another 36 ft each, for a total of about 100 sq ft of veg planting space, which proved to be more than the two of us needed. I would mix up the planting plan every season, but it kept getting simplified down to just the things we were most likely to successfully put to use.

I don’t seem to have any pictures (this was mostly pre-iPhone) with summer crops in full swing, but there were tomatoes and pole beans and lots of other things. The gravel pics above appear to have been taken just when the spring/summer seedlings were sprouting while the favas hadn’t been harvested yet. But my favorite moment every year was putting in the winter crops — poking fat fava seeds and garlic cloves and onion sets into the dirt, knowing they’d need nothing from me until spring.

My memories of this vegetable garden are all about the fava beans, my very favorite thing to grow. And to eat. Everything about them is so lovely, and harvesting and shelling them when the time came was a meditation for me, not a chore.

Oddly, I don’t think I’ve eaten a fava bean since we said goodbye to this garden, and definitely wasn’t able to grow them in my Florida potager, which I’ll show you soon. (Spoiler alert: I scaled it down.)

And one of these days I’ll also show you more of the Befores and Afters from the rest of this garden. It was pretty great.