The Kitchen Garden

Garden Rooms at Havenwood

The Havenwood Kitchen Garden in August 2024

“I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world.

He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating.”

🌿 Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

The story of our Kitchen Garden is a long tale of process over a decade, and working with what we had until we could make it better. It has been the story of growing a bumper crop of tomatoes from freshly dug sod, of leeks that overfilled our kitchen sink and left grit in the drain, and blackberries that were buried under two feet of soil and shot up to bloom another year.

There have been two different veg gardens here over the past decade.

But before that, there was grass and driveway…

Before

Below is a view of the back half of our property at Havenwood before we moved in. You will see a driveway that covers most of the back of the house, and hooks right into an old garage. That area has now become the Ruin Garden, and this old driveway has become the lawn, Long Border, and Kitchen Garden.

First veg garden

The veg garden was the first thing that we dug out in 2014 when we moved into our home. I already had planned to move the driveway, and so we planted the arborvitae hedge right away that year to divide it from the veg patch. These little bushes grew, as did my tiny child in the photo. The shrubs become a nice wind break for this garden, which is very helpful to pollinators, especially in a productive garden where you hope for more fruits from their busy, buzzing labor.

Our arborvitae hedge was planted in 2014, and still is a good wind break for this garden today.