From the Series: WOMEN WHO RUN WITH THE WHEELBARROWS
The Potager Way
by victoria maddux

The summer she was six years old and suddenly thought she knew everything, I had to convince my granddaughter that my humble patchwork of veggies, herbs and flowers constitutes a real garden. "Gardens should have long, neat rows," Ivy Rose announced one day. "There should be bare dirt between the plants instead of all this scraggly hay."

It was a late June morning at Moon Hill, full of bees, butterflies and bird song. Ivy Rose and I were taking turns watering and weeding some of the following: lettuces, green beans, carrots, onions, chard, beets, potatoes, squash, cucumbers, corn, tomatoes, parsley, chives, thyme, basil, dill, sage, borage, lovage, mint, oregano, rosemary, wine berries and blueberries. We were waist high in succulent produce that this child had helped fertilize, harvest, wash, cook and greedily devour. Never before had she expressed doubts that a garden was the focus of all these labors. Only six years old and already in the box!
I explained that there are many kinds of gardens, and that summer we toured a variety of them in our community. She learned that the kind of garden she described was a "stereotype," and that my style - a potager, from "potage," the French word for soup - is perhaps the world's oldest and most popular kind of kitchen garden, found wherever people seriously intend to eat the freshest, most nutritious food possible, as frequently as possible.

Ivy Rose knows that soup is bottom line in nutrition and economy. One of her favorite stories is the marvelous old folk tale, "Stone Soup", which we borrowed from the library again that summer. For millennia—worldwide—soup has gotten people through hard times. A potager, traditionally, is a survival garden.

Of course, anything you can throw in soup you can use in salads, stir fries, casseroles, sandwiches and side dishes. The main goal of a potager is a small, mixed harvest for as many daily meals as possible during the year rather than a large harvest for preservation and storage. The potager gardener plants to satisfy the specific tastes of his or her family. For example, there's still no asparagus bed here at Moon Hill because there's no demand for that particular vegetable, but there's a small corn-on-the-cob patch every summer for Ivy Rose, even though our scant seven hours of midsummer daylight are hardly ideal for corn. But even with light deprivation this severe, a wide variety of crops thrives for three seasons in our narrow, heavily wooded, north-south running cove, 2,500 feet up in the Southern Appalachians.
Three seasons is enough for me, even through the potager is a low effort style of gardening, perfect for seniors. I'm relieved when I abandon the garden after Ivy rose and I plant garlic around Thanksgiving. Like the oaks, hickories and poplars that thrive in the Moon Hill econiche, I need a dormant time to reflect, evaluate, plan, and hunker down with the seed catalogs. And three months of eating store-bought produce—even organically grown—always motivates me to get behind my hoe and garden fork again.

It's early March, and I'm ready. Ivy Rose, now eight, and I are poking around in the winter disheveled garden in mid-afternoon. Ivy Rose is scrutinizing the raised beds, mounded with half-rotted, wind-tousled hay. She has just finished counting the garlic sprouts rising a few inches above the mulch in one of these beds. We planted exactly one hundred cloves for a hands-on lesson in percentages. If we harvest seventy-five bulbs, we can analyze the fate of the other twenty-five and brainstorm how to increase our next season's harvest.

Swatches of row cover, held down at the edges by stones and clumps of hay, partially cover a few raised beds, protecting patches of over-wintered, two or three inch high, crops. Ivy Rose peels back each swatch, happily identifying her discoveries: "Spinach! Kale! Parsley! What kind of lettuce is this? I can't remember."

"Tango," I say. "Isn't it pretty?" Cold hardy, vitamin-rich, mouth-watering Tango looseleaf, which we order from Nichol's Seed Company, is Ivy Rose's favorite lettuce. She smoothes its bright green, feathery leaves.

"How long," she asks, "before we can harvest thinnings?"

"Three weeks, if we get a good rain or two," I estimate.

Our taste buds tingle at the thought of garden fresh thinnings, the crème de la crème of a potager salad harvest. Labeled "Baby lettuce" when marketed, lettuce thinnings presently sell in Western North Carolina for five dollars a pound; eight dollars if organic. Succession plantings of salad greens will give us a nutritional powerhouse of succulent, cheap, gourmet thinnings from mid-March through November.
Succession planting is another potager rule of thumb - small plots of many kinds of vegetables in different stages of development. When you're not harvesting something in a potager, you're planting. Ivy Rose, who has participated in potager gardening ever since she could toddle, well understands the succession planting concept.

"What's going in this bed, after we eat all the Tango lettuce?" she wonders.

I glance at my planting plan. "We'll sow some parsley and radish around the edges of the bed in April; then, for summer, we'll put in a zucchini, just one, and see how big we can grow it."

Ivy Rose holds out a handful of good-sized green onions she's pulled. "Well, all we've got for now are these, so we'll have to have Chinese fried rice for supper." She's expressing another potager practice. What's available to harvest, often determines lunch and supper menus, especially for those of us whose diet is predominantly vegetarian.

Back in the kitchen, Ivy Rose carves the onions into a pile of thin slices and considers. "I think we've got enough of these," she says, "to make fried rice and onion potage."

"You're on," I say, "Get out the potage pot."