Thursday, November 5, 2009

The Potager Garden in Hawaii Grows...




I've started the process finally...the ground has been broken and I've officially started my quest to build a potager garden on this land. Funny thing is that there's no home yet, no soil, no water, no nutrients, no mulch...just pure lava rock and weeds, trash plants and my determination to build my kitchen garden in East Hawaii. Also the potager style of kitchen garden is not a common garden type here in Hawaii. Even though I've always had a fascination about developing a more formal kitchen garden. I envision this being a hybrid style of formal, meets tropical planting... instead of apple and peach allee's, I'll be doing cherimoya, cacao and papaya arbors and borders. In place of blackberries and strawberries, I'll plant pineapple and poha berries. Fortunately herbs can grow anywhere and I'll be fortunate to be able to harvest year round.

Well outside of dreaming about this garden and starting to push some rocks around, I needed to have a game plan. After mulling over the property on where the potager should be placed, I decided to really make this more formal and plot a design plan of how I want this to look....isn't it funny how things get created on little pieces of paper and that's exactly how i started my garden plan...on a wrinkled, garbage tossed out piece of paper. Well, I actually did a few revisions of this plan, bet here's what it looked like when I decided to do an initial draft.

I know this does seem a little bit more hap-hazard than some of the more elaborate plans I've seen like the top picture of the The King's Gardens at Versailles. Needless to say, I was planning a much more scaled down version to that potager, and it would be my very own Hawaiian kitchen garden.


Well, before I go on into the next phase of my journey, I'll be posting some inspirational sites/videos that I've stumbled across on the web. Here's a YouTube video called The Secret Garden - Nocturne, that i enjoyed seeing and listening to at the same time....enjoy.


2 comments:

Miles said...

Noel,
What a beautiful potager garden design. I too love the use of lush tropical plants in a formal pattern. Can't wait to see photos as the garden!
Miles

Sonia said...

I'm glad you directed 'traffic' to this post, Noel. I'm glad to have found it. How is the potager going? I don't have enough room to make an extensive one and the way the sun goes over the area, it is hard to plan a formal one....but I'm trying to 'organize' it as much as possible under the ocnditions....
I would love to see your garden someday!

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