This class is part of the season-spanning series “Growing Your Own Food: Beyond the Bsics,” a follow-up to our extremely popular primer to “Growing Your Own Food” offered in 2011. The classes are designed to take your gardening endeavors to the next level, offering special topics such as elegant kitchen garden design, cultivating and preparing edible flowers, growing shiitake mushrooms, selecting heirloom varieties, and saving seeds. For an overview of the entire series, click here.

Available as individual workshops or as a package at a discounted rate of $210 members/$245 non-members (register below), this series is perfect for people looking for creative ways to enrich their kitchen gardening experience this year.

Class Description: Growing Food Artfully: Kitchen
Garden Design with Ellen Ecker Ogden

A kitchen garden goes beyond the simple straight rows of a vegetable garden to combine art and food in ways that enhance the experience of growing food. In this program that begins with an illustrated lecture and concludes with a hands-on workshop, Ellen Ecker Ogden, co-founder of The Cook’s Garden seed catalog and author, will share with us her journey from basic back yard to elegant European-inspired kitchen garden designs. Participants will learn skills that will allow them to create a unique design to match their own landscape or renovate their current garden to make it more inviting. Through a series of photographs and color illustrations, participants will be inspired to re-think how to plant and design the vegetable patch, with an eye towards formal design, color, texture and culinary purpose. Finally, with graph paper, pencils and photos or your kitchen garden, we’ll take a closer look and brainstorm ways to turn yours into a productive and beautiful edible landscape.

Ecker Ogden is a food and garden writer, kitchen garden designer and author of four books, including her newest, The Complete Kitchen Garden, featuring 15 theme gardens and 100 recipes for the vegetable gardener who seeks creative ideas and organic techniques for growing their own food. As the co-founder of “The Cook’s Garden” catalog, she  is dedicated to growing ornamental edibles and is a featured speaker at national flower shows, botanic gardens and garden events throughout the U.S. She has been a guest on the PBS show “The Victory Garden” and HGTV as the “baroness of basil.” She designs private gardens and holds workshops on kitchen garden designs and techniques throughout the U.S.

Where: Bosarge Family Education Center
Price: $50 members, $60 non-members (pre-registration required)