At the heart of French country cuisine is the small multi-season kitchen garden known as a potager. Join Cottage Gardeners of Plum Creek for a free overview and planning workshop for a potager adapted for
Central Texas, suitable for small spaces and container gardening.
At this meeting we will also organize & sign up for next month's seedling exchange. Because
most seed packages contain a great deal more seed than necessary for
a small garden, we will each raise a few packages to the seedling stage to exchange with each other at the March meeting on
Saturday, March 19. This should allow for a great deal of fun and variety for your own potager from the investment of only
a package or two of seed.
“A potager, unlike
an American harvest garden, which is planted in spring and harvested in summer, is a rear-round kitchen garden in which one
is both planting and harvesting throughout the calendar,” according to noted cookbook author Georgeanne Brennan in Savoring France. Our mild Central Texas winters at 30 degree North latitude
(we are south of the south of France), gives us even more of an advantage in four season gardening.
Brennan writes in In the French Kitchen Garden: The Joys of
Cultivating a Potager (Chronicle Books,1998)," in France, the kitchen garden or potager, has for centuries been
a cornerstone of the country way of life. Much more than a vegetable patch, the French kitchen garden is a communion
between the indoors and the outdoors - a means of living in harmony with the earth, culminating in simple, elegant meals prepared
fresh with the flavors of the season. Growing a potager is a life-affirming, enriching pursuit that can be easily adapted
to almost any climate or lifestyle."
Wondering what to plant and how to incorporate the new things you
might grow into your cooking? For inspiration, browse through Deborah Madison's Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating
from America's Farmers' Markets (Broadway Books, 2002). If you can find it, Perla Meyers multi-award winning 1973
cookbook, The Seasonal Kitchen: A Return to Fresh Foods, is based on the idea of the potager and started the
cooking revolution in the United States evident on menus today. Meyers starts from the idea of the seasonal kitchen
garden. Her collection of more than 300 recipes are arranged around the seasons and draw from the country cuisine of
Europe.
Georgeanne Brennans' Savoring France is part of the Williams-Sonoma,
Time-Life series and is widely available. And don't forget to check online. The Cook's Garden www.cooksgarden.com maintains a seasonal recipe base linked to color pictures and growing instructions for gorgeous heirloom plants from seed
for the potager.
Renee's Garden is another favorite seed packager with a great website,
www.reneesgarden.com. Beautiful watercolor illustrations are just part of Renee's magic. Along with enchanting background information,
she thoughtfully offers easy access to variety for the small-space gardener with tiny seed collections in one small, inexpensive package.
Each seed variety has been painted with a different color of vegetable food dye, so you might get 12 each of three different
heirloom eggplant varieties packaged together for under $3.
We are fueled
by community-minded volunteers and meetings are free. Donations for materials are appreciated. This is not a luncheon
meeting, but members are welcome to bring their own brown bag lunch.
