French Intensive Gardening

French Intensive Gardening. Not to be confused with French formal garden style, with its carefully planned symmetry of geometric plots of manicured lawn, hedges, and flowering plants, French Intensive Gardening is a technique that focuses on achieving high plant yields in small spaces.

French Intensive Gardening is also called Market Gardening, and the latter is perhaps a more informative name. It causes us to think of the average family’s small-sized growing area being cared for and planted in such a way that the family is not only able to sustain itself with a variety of produce and flowers but can also take excess crops to market.

While the term “crops” may cause us to think of acreage, commercial tools, and a professional commitment to growing plants, the Market Garden should be thought of on a much, much smaller scale. It allows for eating and enjoyment of a good variety of plants… fresh fruit and colorful veg to feed the body, plus (why not?) pretty annual flowers to feed the soul. But rather than having bushel upon bushel of excess to “take to market” or share with friends, the overage is not nearly so great in volume…. It is just right, just enough.

Picture an open-air market in the center of a village somewhere in the French countryside, and a table stocked by one family. One week, the family may fill that table with an abundance of strawberries that have been grown in raised containers. The next week, lettuces, bright green and ruffled, may make up most of the table space, accompanied by herbs and some twine-tied bouquets of fresh annual flowers. And new produce and flowers, of great variety, will continue to fill the table all summer. Here, you are daydreaming about the summertime yield that can be achieved using the French Intensive Gardening method.

Now, going back to talk of informative names, it should be mentioned that this method is also called Square-Foot Gardening, indicating that it makes use of every square foot available to yield wonderful plants (mainly annual plants) that provide us fresh fruits and veggies, in particular. Square-Foot Gardening is a perfect name, and one that makes us realize that in a small space, we have to think of “reaching to the sky” to allow for more growing space and reaching down deep into the soil to ensure that the roots of our annual plants quickly find space and nutrients for themselves. Thus, we realize that this form of gardening involves growing at a number of levels (in raised beds of varying heights, with some employing trellises and other means to access even more vertical space; garden-floor beds; and even recessed beds), and digging deep into the soil to ensure it is as aerated and rich as possible. Sure enough, this manner of gardening expands the bounds of both our garden plots and our thinking.

So, what exactly does French Intensive Gardening involve? As a start, it involves the following:

1. Planning out space in the garden.
2. Digging deep into beds, loosening the soil, and removing weeds.
3. Using fine compost and/or manure and giving it plenty of time to enrich the soil before digging annual plants into the ground.
4. Making the best use of the different planes in the garden—horizontal, vertical, mid-level planes that are created by raised beds… in other words, using every square foot of garden width and height, and thinking of how access to the sun, access to water, and water retention will be improved by the placement of plants that you choose.
5. Planting (mainly annual) plants in tightly packed beds. While spacing is a good watch word when it comes to gardening in general, packing plant-starts close by one another—closer than you otherwise would—is part of French Intensive Gardening. It fills your growing space with greenery almost tout de suite, and it reduces the number of weeds that can fit into bare spots in the garden bed (because there are so few).
6. Starting with small annual plants rather than starting from seed. Take every head-start you can, and get your plants growing.
7. Choosing good companion “crops” (example, tall plants with leaves that will shade the sun from underplantings of other annual plants that grow best in shaded spots), and choosing crops that will mature in rapid succession. You don’t want your “market table” to be empty during any given week. Each week should mean a new taste sensation can be picked or dug up, and new flowers, enjoyed.

There is a lot to learn about French Intensive Gardening, with its roots that date back to the 16^th century. How best to prepare your soil for high-yielding crops…? Research double-digging, as one example. How best to choose companion plants…? Think not only of time-to-maturity and how you can stagger the harvesting of fruits, veg, and annual flowers, but also consider which plants have long root structures and which have shorter roots. Knowing which annual plants will access nutrients at different levels in a given planting bed will help you choose companions, not competitors.

Details here scratch the surface of what French Intensive Gardening is… and just as this method of gardening entails deep digging, you will want to dig much more deeply into research on this gardening technique. But don’t think you have to know everything about this way of gardening before you give it a try. You may not make the best decisions about plant pairings at first. Despite work, you’ll probably not get your soil to be anywhere near as rich as you’d like it to be. But if French Intensive Gardening is of interest, give it a try. This year, set things up based on a few tenets of this technique, and see how it goes. You’ll certainly be using only a small space for this trial run, no big investment there. And based on what you learn from your trial run, you’ll make improvements for future summers. 

Bon jardinage! Happy gardening!