Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Bunny Williams Potager: Complex, Pretty & Easy Life Support

Have seen potagers, below, for decades.  Across Europe & USA.  
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Potager: flowers, vegetables, herbs, clipped edging.
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Recent epiphany about what a potager is.


Mixing flowers & herbs with vegetables increases yields up to 80%.  How?  Increasing pollinator habitat.
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Clipped hedging keeps chickens out.  Chickens destroy vegetables/herbs/flowers, but eat harmful bugs. 
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Plus, you get chicken shit.
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Instead of a merely sweet, pretty, easy, garden design style, the potager was
a life support system throughout much of history.  Terrible history, with subsistence living, wars, plagues, no anti-biotics.
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How did anyone, aka me, not know this about a potager?  My grandmother knew these things.  My mother falls within the scope of Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique.  The generation of women leaving farms/agrarian knowledge behind to live a modern life raising children, tending house with a maid's help, and no work outside the home.  Oh, the drudgery of it all and yes I'm one of those grown children crying throughout, The Help, every time I watch it.
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" Friedan says that this change in education arrested girls in their emotional development at a young age, because they never had to face the painful identity crisis and subsequent maturation that comes from dealing with many adult challenges.[9]"
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Sinful forgetting, a client named this loss of agrarian knowledge.
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Recently, because I now have chickens, mom has told stories about Grandma's chickens.  Grandma was an RN & head nurse at her hospital in Augusta, GA.  throughout those years she kept chickens and incubated many.  Mom was an only child and said how she hated the time her mother spent with the chickens.  From the stories I know Grandma raised significantly more chickens than her family needed or could feed easily with food scraps.  Why?  Grandma was giving away eggs and laying hens to every woman she met who needed a helping hand.   
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Garden & Be Well,      XO Tara
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Pic Bunny Williams
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Books by Tara Dillard, Amazon
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Tara Dillard & Associates Design: farm to city pied-a-terre.
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Construction by Award Winning:
Shaefer Heard Construction, licensed home-builder, renovation - new construction.  Heard's Landscaping a unit of SHC.  3 decades of service.

3 comments:

emily said...

We are going back to our grandmothers' time...love this post.
Mother too, smart as she is, didn't learn to can b/c cans were at the grocery store...Not in Gracie's time...

La Contessa said...

Gorgeous GRANDMAMA!!!

Anonymous said...

I love your Grandmother, too!

Part of this makes no sense! Was your mother jealous of the chickens because your grandmother didn't give her enough attention?

Chickens are delightful to raise; and easy!

I wasn't there! However; I can tell you they are really fun to have; really fun to watch!

and they eat every slug and snail; and so fun to have chicks!

XXOO

Brilliant, Tara!!!