How to Create a Kitchen Garden

Growing your own food is a wonder-filled experience, no matter how you do it. Kitchen gardens focus on food, but these small-scale gardens serve a special purpose that more traditional vegetable gardens don’t. With a kitchen garden steps away from where your family cooks and prepares meals, you can bring ultra-fresh ingredients to your menu — whatever the meal.

Kitchen gardens aren’t a new idea. Early American settlers kept kitchen gardens close to their door for convenience and preservation. Modern kitchen gardens have a similar focus on easy access to homegrown ingredients, but with a flair for therapeutic beauty and tranquility as well as food. Whether you have a more traditional vegetable garden or not, you can enjoy your own special space with these kitchen garden basics.

• Kitchen Garden Locations
• Kitchen Garden Size and Layouts
• Planting Your Kitchen Garden
• How to Maintain a Kitchen Garden
• Pest Protection for Kitchen Gardens

Kitchen Garden Locations

First of all, true kitchen gardens are outdoor gardens — not indoor gardens grown on shelves or windowsills. Ideally, your kitchen garden should be located right outside your door. When you need a little snip of rosemary or basil, a few sun-warmed cherry tomatoes, maybe fresh, juicy blueberries or strawberries for breakfast or dessert — your kitchen garden is right there for you.

From herbs and fruiting vegetables to berries, plants grown for food are most productive when they get at least six to eight hours of sun each day. So if that sunny spot at your house is a few extra steps from a shaded kitchen door, go for the sun. But don’t go too far. Keep your kitchen garden close to a faucet so it’s easy to water your kitchen crops.

Kitchen Garden Size and Layouts

By definition, kitchen gardens are smaller in size and more focused than large-scale veggie gardens. Planting directly in the ground is a good idea for perennial plants, like berry bushes, that you’ll want to keep around for years. But kitchen gardens come in all shapes and forms. Think of it like landscapes where edible plants and flowers mingle — just smaller and closer to where you cook and prepare food.

Raised garden beds make tending your kitchen garden convenient (and gentler on knees and backs). Container gardens, trellises, vertical wall gardens and even hanging baskets can hold your kitchen garden crops. Whatever your garden layout, a delightful mix of your family’s favorite flavors and plants close at hand is key.

Planting Your Kitchen Garden

With kitchen gardens, you’ll plant all the scents and tastes you love most. Tidy rows of plants go by the wayside. Instead, smaller groupings of diverse plants let you harvest varied flavorings or produce from day to day or even meal to meal. You can plant around your family’s favorite bruschetta toppings, go-to grilled vegetables, or edible flowers for a finishing touch on salads and summertime drinks. Or just start with easy-to-grow fruits and veggies.

Some plants, like lettuce and leafy salad greens, can be grown from seed planted directly in the ground. As you harvest salad greens, you can keep planting seed for more kitchen harvests ahead. For plants like bell peppers, tomatoes and zucchinis — usually grown from garden store transplants — you can stagger the times when they’ll ripen, so you’ll enjoy different food as the season grows on.

How to Maintain a Kitchen Garden

Food-producing plants, whether vegetables or fruits, need plenty of water and lots of nutrients. Whether you grow in the ground, in garden beds or something else, you’ll want to make sure your kitchen garden gets at least 1 inch of water per week (including rainfall). Whenever your garden soil dries out a few inches deep, water thoroughly to help keep your fruits and veggies tasty, plump and firm.

Kitchen gardens, like other small-scale gardens, rely on a limited amount of soil. Keeping your garden well-nourished is important to how it looks and tastes. Pennington® Rejuvenate™ Plant Food All-Purpose 4-4-4 is excellent for feeding herbs, leafy greens and root crops like carrots and beets. For vegetables and fruits, Pennington Rejuvenate Plant Food Tomato & Vegetable 4-5-4 helps your kitchen garden grow bigger, better, more bountiful harvests vs. unfed plants.

Pest Protection for Kitchen Gardens

You'll want to share your kitchen garden with family and friends, but draw the line at insect pests. Sevin® Garden Perimeter Insect Killer Granules, in a convenient shaker container, makes it easy to create a barrier against damaging insects around your kitchen garden. These easy-to-use granules kill listed pests by contact and keep protecting against those pests for up to three months.

If pests do make their way into your kitchen garden, liquid Sevin Insect Killer Ready to Use₂ kills more than 700 listed pests on contact. Apply it at the first sign of unwelcome insects to protect your plants against pest damage. Just shake the sprayer container well, and you’re ready to spray. Sevin Sulfur Dust, for use as a dust or spray, delivers 2-in-1 control for listed diseases and insect pests.

Whatever controls you choose, always follow the pre-harvest intervals (PHI) on the product label. The PHI is how long you need to wait between application and harvest, and it’s different for every product and plant. Tomatoes are a good example: With Sevin® Garden Perimeter Insect Killer Granules, allow 1 day between application and harvest. For Sevin Insect Killer Ready To Use₂, allow five days. For Sevin Sulfur Dust, you can treat tomatoes right up to harvest time.

When your kitchen garden puts nutritious homegrown vegetables, herbs and other garden-fresh ingredients just steps away, you can enjoy gardening and homegrown food in ways you’ve never experienced before. We're here to help you achieve all your garden dreams, from your first flower garden to homegrown food galore. Have a question about gardening or garden pests? Talk to us. We're here for you.

Always read product labels thoroughly and follow instructions, including guidelines for listed plants and pests, application frequency, and pre-harvest intervals (PHI) for edible crops.

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Pennington and Rejuvenate are trademarks of Pennington Seed, Inc.