We Love a Good Kitchen Garden
the beauty and simplicity of this twin garden corten setup is too good to keep to ourselves.
I so enjoyed designing and installing this kitchen garden in the summer of 2018 right in the center of Houston, Texas, for my company, Rooted Garden, Inc.
My client, Danielle, and her husband had already decided they’d enjoy having their own kitchen garden in their landscape and had even set aside this section of the yard to be for that very purpose.
Though the area does not have the full sun exposure that you'd hope for with a typical kitchen garden, there's more than five hours of sunlight in this space, so it's the perfect place to plant and grow greens and herbs.
And the great part of growing a kitchen garden in a corten steel garden bed is that the steel garden will warm up a little more quickly than a wood bed, so these planters make the most of the sunlight they do receive.
what exactly is corten steel?
Weathering steel, often referred to by the genericized trademark COR-TEN steel and sometimes written without the hyphen as corten steel, is a group of steel alloys which were developed to eliminate the need for painting, and form a stable rust-like appearance after several years' exposure to weather.
(definition according to Wikipedia)
They’d chosen the spot as one they could enjoy from their living room window and from their outdoor sitting area complete with a corten fire pit. If you're not familiar, corten actually originated as a brand name for a type of steel that rusts to a certain point but then doesn't rust anymore.
Corten has grown so much in popularity over the last decade that the term is now used to describe the steel type in general, rather than just describing the original brand name.
For these planters, I hired a steel designer to create these corten beds in a custom size for my client and her unique area.
We originally discussed having three gardens in this space or even having two longer gardens, but in the end, we decided to keep it simpler with larger walkways around the garden beds for our client.
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Since the garden would be connected to the seating area, I designed the kitchen garden space to coordinate with the fire pit in both height and material. The steel designer delivered these gardens right to the spot the day before Rooted Garden installed the garden.
The beds were so heavy it took two men to carry them off the back of the truck into the yard. As a garden consultant, this was my first time to install a corten garden, so the delivery of the beds was almost like opening a gift on Christmas day to me—and these weren't even my gardens!
This was my first corten garden to design and it was such a treat to see the custom garden designed and delivered to fit the space perfectly.
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kitchen garden layout ideas
Though one single garden could have fit in this space just as well as two, the coupling of the two boxes makes the space feel much more like an experience and getaway rather than a simple box. The saying that "two is better than one" isn't just talking about people or puppies, it applies to a vegetable garden layout too. Two separate gardens divided by a walkway creates much more of a "getaway" feeling inside your raised garden area and prevents the dreaded "awkward garden" situation.
I call this the "Twin Garden" layout, and we use this often in our designs for Rooted Garden clients. The symmetry and repetition that two gardens create as opposed to just one long garden creates a special feeling and aesthetic in the garden. Twin Gardens are one of the simplest layouts for a kitchen garden.
how do you plant vegetables in this garden layout
The separation of two gardens enables a really beautiful style for planting vegetables and herbs. There are so many options for planting these two gardens, and the separation allows us to plant each box just as our client desires.
You could plant each box with a unique vegetable that you want to grow a lot of in a particular season. For instance, you could fill one entire box with carrots or another could be filled with just lettuces. Or you could plant each of them symmetrically to mirror one another so that there's the same number and placement of plants from one box to the next.
My personal preference is planting symmetrically, as you can see from these images. I love creating a planting that mimics that of a formal landscape and looks beautiful from far away.
The best part of having a Twin Garden setup is that you have more freedom to break up your plantings, slow down any interested pests, and design a unique planting each and every season.
is it safe to grow vegetables in a steel container?
I get this question a lot, so I answered it inside my book, Kitchen Garden Revival:
"Although steel is made from mined iron, it’s been proven to be quite a sustainable resource, as it can always be completely recycled. Some steel may be treated with zinc for durability but there’s little to no chance this will affect the organic nature of your soil.
Steel gardens will, literally, last a lifetime—and then some. And one thing I love about garden beds made with steel is the small footprint of the bed itself. If you’re growing in a small space and want to maximize your growing area, a steel bed enables you to give nearly all the space to your plants while still having a super strong garden bed that will never give up growing."