What Is a Potager Garden (And Why It's the Only One You Need)

A potager garden is a beautiful, functional kitchen garden that grows vegetables, herbs, flowers, and fruit together. Once you understand what it is, you’ll wonder why you ever gardened another way.

There are so many different kinds of garden styles to choose from, but I am going to argue that a potager garden is the only vegetable garden you really need.

It’s a beautiful garden style, low-maintenance, practical, functional, and diverse.

When I first learned what a potager was, I knew that was the style of garden I wanted to have.

I love looking at potager gardens for inspiration and immersing myself in the experience of any that I get the opportunity to visit.

Unless you are growing commercially on a farm, for market, I think a potager garden is the best style of vegetable garden to grow.

Let’s find out why!

What Is a Potager Garden?

Potager (poh-tah-zhay) in French means “soup pot.” Everything grown in a French potager garden back in the day was used to make a healthy “potage,” or soup.

A potager garden is an ornamental kitchen garden with a mix of vegetables, fruits, flowers, and herbs in either an informal or romantic style or a more formal style.

These gardens often are located near the kitchen so cooks can run out and grab the ingredients they need for cooking.

Historically these gardens were an oasis or a paradise. An artistically designed, beautiful garden meant for escape and rejuvenation.

These gardens fed the soul as well as the stomach.

Why Grow a Potager Garden

A potager garden is a way of life: learning to use homegrown food in the kitchen, eating seasonally, enjoying and being more in tune with your land. Simple living at its finest.

I grow a potager garden because it’s practical yet beautiful, to improve my mental and physical health, encourage biodiversity, support pollinators, and feed my creativity.

Growing this style of garden also helps eliminate a lot of the biggest mistakes beginner gardeners make.

For Practicality and Function

A well-designed potager garden is located near the kitchen for easy access while cooking. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve run out with pots bubbling away on the stove to grab an herb or a handful of tomatoes to toss into a sauce or salsa.

I love having my garden close to the house.

I probably eat more directly from my garden because it’s so close to the house.

We also focus on growing food that we love to eat. Tomatoes, basil, cucumbers… These and more are tried-and-true favorites of my family.

Of course we’ll try new things every year to see if they’ll be come a favorite, but I’d say 90% of my potager garden has veggies, herbs, and fruits that we already enjoy.

This to me is the ultimate goal of growing a vegetable garden. Why grow plants you don’t want to eat?

For Beauty

Potagers are also beautiful to look at. Plants are placed together to contrast or enhance the color or shape of one another and that just makes for a more interesting and pleasing effect.

Having our own garden means we get to choose how it looks. Of course, I want mine to look as beautiful as I know it can be!

I think our culture is starting to move away from the stigma that vegetable gardens are ugly, and I’m so glad.

Look at these cabbages, for example. Green, blue, and purple leaves. It’s colorful, it’s edible, and it’s beautiful.

Let’s stop growing ugly gardens and start planting beautiful ones.

To Improve Our Health

Growing a garden and interacting with nature in your own backyard is one of the best stress-relievers. Spending time looking at and caring for a garden can improve mood, and lessen depression and anxiety.

I try to balance the time I spend working in the garden with the time I spend enjoying and delighting in it.

The enjoying and delighting part is what carries me through the difficult labor of weeding and managing pests and disease.

Planting and maintaining a garden provides purposeful, natural movement and exercise. Digging in the dirt, raking leaves, hauling a wagon-load of compost through the grass are all gardening tasks that get my heart rate up and help me get stronger.

Let’s not forget the health benefits of growing your own organic vegetables, herbs, and fruit.

I enjoy eating fresh vegetables in season from my own garden. I’m not kidding when I say homegrown vegetables taste sweeter and are more delicious than store-bought.

There’s a little bit of a learning curve to knowing how to grow certain vegetables for the best flavor, and also picking vegetables at the right time is crucial for flavor.

But doesn’t learning new skills keep our minds young and limber? This article says yes!

To Encourage Biodiversity in My Backyard

Potager gardens are biodiverse, containing a mix of vegetables, herbs, trees, shrubs, and flowers.

Biodiversity is essential for a healthy ecosystem that supports life. Human life, plant life, animal life, and microorganisms.

You may even have fewer pests by encouraging nesting birds and beneficial predatory insects to feast in your garden.

I’ve noticed a big decrease in unwanted pests in my garden this year and an increase in the number of nesting sparrows in the trees surrounding our property. Birds prefer to feed their young with insects, and I have plenty of those trolling my garden!

I’ve also noticed a number of predatory wasps catching cabbage moth caterpillars and asparagus beetle larvae this year.

Having fewer pests reduces the need for pest control, which often does more harm to the environment than good.

Have you heard of companion planting? Some gardeners believe that planting certain plants together causes them to grow better.

A famous example of this is the Native American Three Sister’s Garden of corn, squash, and beans grown together.

The corn provides a pole for the beans to grow on, the squash shades the soil and protects the roots of the other plants, and the beans fix nitrogen in the soil with their roots to help the other plants grow well.

For more on this, read my post on companion planting squash.

To Support Pollinators

Pollinators like bees, butterflies, hummingbirds, and moths are so important to our survival.

Without pollinators, we wouldn’t have most of our fruits and vegetables. We wouldn’t have seeds to plant or eat.

As suburban and urban areas grow, more and more pollinators are at risk. They can’t find flowers to drink nectar from. They can’t find the right plant species to lay their eggs on.

Every gardener should at the very least plant flowers for to support pollinators and leave them unsprayed by pesticides or herbicides to protect the bees and butterflies from harm.

In a kitchen garden, planting a wide array of flowers is encouraged to draw pollinators in. In turn, pollinators pollinate our cucumbers, squash, and other fruiting vegetables so that our gardens produce food for us to eat.

Want to learn more about this topic? Read my post on why you should grow companion flowers in your vegetable garden.

As a Creative Outlet

A potager garden is a garden that is beautiful and functional. A potager garden allows you to be creative.

It’s small enough to manage and maintain.

Vegetables and many of the flowers grown alongside them are mostly annuals. This means that the plants will need to be replanted every year, and who says you have to put them in the same spot every time?

In fact, it’s best for your soil to move your annuals yearly and plant them in different places so nutrients don’t get depleted.

This offers the opportunity to try new plant combinations and be creative in the garden.

The structure of a potager garden provides the framework, while I provide the color, texture, and fluff of plants.

See a menu of all the different edible plants you can put in your potager garden.

I’ve been working on the structure of my in-ground garden for the last three years. I love that it’s easy to move the bricks around and change up the layout of the garden.

I also love that my raised beds are set in place. It helps me focus more on choosing the plants I want to grow rather than imagining all the different ways I could set up the raised bed garden.

If you like having more layout options, you might prefer an in-ground garden with beds lined in a material that is easy to rearrange.

But, if you struggle with analysis paralysis, maybe fixed beds would help you focus on what you’re growing than where to put it!

Here’s a post I wrote to help you decide whether raised beds or in-ground gardens are the best option for you.

How to Start a Potager or Kitchen Garden

Have I convinced you to start your own potager? Here’s a quick, 7-step version of how to plan your garden.

Choose the right location—one with full sun, close to a hose, and prominently positioned so you can see it from the window or your back patio. Find more on choose the right location for a new garden here.
Design the layout, incorporating hardscape like paths, borders, trellises, and possibly raised beds. Limit yourself to just one or two materials and one or two accent colors, ideally complementing your house material, color, and style. This helps make your potager garden feel like it’s always been there.
Select a mix of vegetables, fruit, herbs, and of course, beautiful flowers. Find a few of my favorite companion flowers for a vegetable garden here.
Install your hardscape. Take your time and make sure everything looks just right to you. Then prepare your soil with compost and plant at the right time using the spacing recommended on the plant tags.
Make a watering schedule or install automated watering. This will help get plants established without stress and reduce the mental load.
Cover exposed soil with a biodegradable mulch like clean straw, shredded leaves, or wood chip mulch. Plants will eventually fill in the gaps, but they’ll appreciate having a little extra cover while they grow.
Add any other things you feel will make your new garden your favorite place to be. Benches, statues and other garden decor, and fountains all add personality and make your garden more unique to you.

Ready to go deeper on the design side? This post walks through all 8 elements of a well-designed potager garden in detail and will guide your design process.

Your Turn to Grow a Potager Garden

Finally, spend time enjoying your garden. A happy, healthy garden needs a happy, healthy gardener. Take time to enjoy what you worked so hard to create.

If you’re new to gardening, start small and expand over time. It’s fine to have a grand plan that you execute in small stages.

Installing a large, intricate garden can quickly become expensive. Breaking up your plan into stages will help alleviate the cost and give you time to finalize details or change things.

Growing a garden is a rewarding experience. There is nothing like enjoying a beautiful garden just a few steps outside your door and having a table full of food and flowers that you grew yourself.

Plant it; grow it; enjoy it.

Do you need more inspiration or information on potager gardening?

Here are some of my other posts you might like.

FAQs

Is a potager garden high-maintenance?

It doesn’t have to be. Traditional French potagers can be elaborate and demanding, but a home potager is as simple or as involved as you want it to be. Most home gardeners find that mixing flowers in with vegetables actually reduces pest pressure and makes the garden easier to manage overall — not harder.

What Is a Potager Garden (And Why It’s the Only One You Need)