What Even Is a Kitchen Garden?
Whenever I talk about kitchen gardening, I inevitably get this question:
“Nicole, what exactly is a kitchen garden? Is it just growing plants in your kitchen window?”
While I do consider a couple of potted herbs grown on the windowsill in your kitchen a kitchen garden, it can also be so much more than that.
A kitchen garden is any garden where plants are grown to be brought into the kitchen on a regular basis. To help explain, I thought I'd compare a kitchen garden to a vegetable garden to help you discover which one fits you best. Here are four key differences:
Vegetable Garden vs Kitchen Garden: Size
A Kitchen Garden Is Often Smaller in Size than a Vegetable Garden
A kitchen garden is relatively small, ranging from 20 to 200 square feet. Generally, a kitchen garden is designed inside of raised garden beds for a clean aesthetic. But a vegetable garden could be huge, requiring thousands of square feet. When I think of vegetable gardens, I think of acre after acre of sprawling fields of pumpkins, gourds, or corn.
Vegetable Garden vs Kitchen Garden: Location
A Kitchen Garden Is Often Closer to the Home than a Vegetable Garden
A kitchen garden is located as close to your kitchen as possible. My own kitchen garden is visible from my kitchen window and can be accessed easily. This makes it super easy for me to pop outside with scissors to snip some herbs for dinner or some lettuce leaves for my lunch. Proximity to your home means that kitchen gardens often become focal points of your landscape and even a central gathering place for family and friends. For this reason, they're designed to look beautiful all seasons of the year.
A vegetable garden is usually located further from your home due to its demand for additional space and its sometimes not-so-tidy appearance. Proximity doesn't matter as much for a vegetable garden because it doesn't require regular tending like a kitchen garden does.
Vegetable Garden vs Kitchen Garden: Tending Time
A Kitchen Garden Is Tended More Often than a Vegetable Garden
A kitchen garden is tended regularly, a little bit at a time. You may head to your kitchen garden three to four times per week to grab herbs or greens for that day's salad. While you're there harvesting, you might help a sugar snap pea tendril attach to a trellis or pluck a yellowed leaf. The harvests from a kitchen garden are often used fresh rather than preserved. Think: a daily salad, green drink, or one garden-inspired meal a week.
A vegetable garden is tended more intensively with big planting, harvesting, and storing days. Think: canned beans, salsa, a freezer packed with harvests, or even a root cellar.
Vegetable Garden vs Kitchen Garden: Purpose
A Kitchen Garden Is About a Lifestyle While a Vegetable Garden Is More About Production
A kitchen garden is developed more as a key component of creating a healthier lifestyle than for huge harvests. Kitchen gardens are focused on the fun of learning and experiencing seeds turn into food, enjoying the change in seasons, and having a few things to harvest and share inside the kitchen regularly. In the kitchen garden, you can grow a large quantity of a small variety of plants, or you can grow a small quantity of a large variety of plants.
On the contrary, a vegetable garden is grown almost entirely for production. The purpose is much less focused on experience and much more toward lots and lots of produce.
A Vegetable Garden May Not Be Possible for Everyone
While I think large vegetable gardens are wonderful, they're honestly just not practical for most of us. When I started my Houston-based garden consulting business, Rooted Garden, I quickly realized that many of my clients weren't looking for a homestead experience. They didn't want to have to can or jar their extra produce. They just wanted to learn to garden and enjoy small fruits of their labor. They wanted the experience of growing a little bit of their food without being overwhelmed.
Unlike a large vegetable garden, a kitchen garden really is possible for anyone.
Because a kitchen garden can be quite small, doesn't require intensive tending, and can be used in so many simple ways, I'm convinced there's a way for just about everyone to have some form of a kitchen garden—growing a little of their own food for the experience and joy of adding small harvests to their everyday meals.
What's Best for You? Vegetable Garden or Kitchen Garden?
So, what do you think?
Are you meant to have a vegetable garden or a kitchen garden?
Being a mom of four kids and a business owner, it's going to be kitchen gardening for me, for at least all of the foreseeable future. I just don't have the energy or time to tend a vegetable garden at this stage in my life.
The kitchen garden, though, is my favorite part of my home. It makes cooking so much more fun for me and gives me a spot to "get away" in my own backyard.
If you're on the fence about starting a garden, I hope this distinction gives you insight and encouragement that you don't have to live like a farmer in order to have a garden. The kitchen garden really is possible for all of us, and I'm excited to grow with you in your own gardening journey this year.
If you haven’t already, learn more about the Kitchen Garden Academy and discover three ways you can make the kitchen garden part of your everyday life next year.
Thanks so much for growing with me!
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