I have always wanted an English cottage vegetable garden. I love symmetry, order, picket fences, and walking paths. While I’m not sure where the love came from, I know the gardens at historic sites always stayed with me. The mix of flowers, vegetables, and herbs–culinary and medicinal–made the garden such a lovely place to linger and be. The taking of the very practical need for food and making it beautiful.
When I bought our current 1940s cottage in 2014, I knew the one “con” to this suburban homestead site was the serious shade. Established trees are great until you need to grow vegetables…I still grew herbs and added a cute picket fence, but always knew I’d need more sun someday whether by moving or chopping down some mature oak trees. Upon meeting and marrying Farmer Nathan, the scheming to move out into the country began and 8 years later I now get to start my English cottage vegetable garden on a total blank slate with gorgeous southern exposure. We are so excited!
Thought I would take you through our future cottage garden plans on this dreary winter day. Hope you will join me for a cup of tea and some garden dreaming.
Note: This post contains affiliate links. We earn a small commission at no additional cost to you. Read our disclaimer for more details.
Orientation and Scale
First things first, orientation and scale. Our English-style vegetable garden will be in our front yard as it is southern exposure without a tree in sight. Our drawing here is using the scale of 1 square = 2 feet. Drawing to scale allows us to plan how many seeds we need to purchase and start and figure out preliminary spacing and planting locations. Being able to draw to scale is one of the reasons why I love dot matrix of bullet journals (Also, if you’d like some more garden planning worksheets along with some graph paper for doodling, check out our garden journal in our shop.)
Picket Fence
At the outer boundaries of the front yard will eventually be a picket fence with 2-feet of growing space on either side of the fence. The picket fence will serve two purposes. First, I love the look of it and I want it to look nice. Second, we plan to have livestock (cows, pigs, sheep, etc.) over the years. While we plan to keep them in an electric fence out in the pasture, we know they will escape sometimes. So, we want an extra barrier to keep them out of the garden while we run around trying to get them back into their paddocks. 😉
Gates
We plan to have quite a few gates in and out of our vegetable garden eventually, but I wanted to point out one in particular. Up along the house side, you’ll see a gate placed on the left-hand side. This gate leads straight to our exterior stairs down into our basement. We designed this on purpose to give us easy access to our “root cellar” (aka basement) where we plan to store our potatoes, winter squash, garlic, onions, and so on.
Classic Quadrants
As you can see, we have the classic quadrants of a traditional formal garden, but I chose to divide them up into 2 sections each for accessibility. With a flower garden, being able to reach into the middle of a large bed is less of a concern as you wouldn’t be doing it daily. But when the vegetable harvest is coming in, you need easy access to all the crops. Don’t want to be stepping on the carrots as you try to reach the ripe tomatoes! So I took into account being able to reach about 3 feet all the way around each garden bed.
Wide Aisles
From a market gardening perspective the aisles are rather large, but we are making them large on purpose. Having tried the market garden spaces of 30-inch beds with 18-inch aisles, I knew I wanted more space to maneuver. I personally like to be able to sit down or kneel without crushing the crops behind me! Also, we discovered we like the Back-to-Eden style of gardening that involves moving a lot of wood chips around and we wanted to be able to fit a good size wheelbarrow or garden cart in the aisles for that purpose.
Larger Beds
Outside the central square are 4 larger garden beds. As we will be finishing our house and moving this spring, we will probably not get around to planting them this year, but we wanted to mark their location as we bring in wood chips and put up the picket fence. These larger beds will be for the sprawling crops. The last few years our loofah gourds and yuxi squash TAKE OVER the whole garden by the end of the season, so we wanted to give them a spot where they could sprawl and not choke out our tomatoes like they did this past summer. Also, we want to be able to grow all of our own popcorn and potatoes and therefore we need a large enough garden patch to grow a sizable crop.
Miscellaneous
In the center, I’d love some sort of focal point. We may start with a bird bath we already have…but I have my heart set on a cool sundial someday! Also, another the front of the house we plan to mix some edibles with ornamentals. Tea olive shrubs with blueberries or something along those lines. We also plan to mix in perennial flowers like daffodils, dahlias, lilies, daisies, and irises around the garden as well for some added beauty.
Wrap Up
Well, I hope this virtual tour around our English Cottage Vegetable Garden has been helpful in giving you some ideas for your own potager garden. Don’t forget to check out our garden journal printable pages to help you plan your own gorgeous garden. Happy growing, friends!