Garden Gallery

Liguori

In spring 2006, Glencoe yoga teacher Alison Liguori had just bought a new home, and was in the process of figuring out how best to lay out the surrounding grounds. It was the perfect time to rejuvenate her connection to nature by taking on a task she’d always left to others: growing food. Eager to learn fresh skills, put her passions for healthful living and ecological responsibility into practice, and share those skills and passions with her three middle- and high-school-age children, she enlisted The Organic Gardener’s help to install an organic vegetable garden in her backyard.

The TOG team designed Alison’s garden in tandem with her landscape architect, in order to ensure that the shape and style of the beds and fence would harmonize with the aesthetic of the house and surrounding grounds. The outcome was a picturesque trio of timber-framed raised beds (which give the garden a trim and orderly appearance, and are easy for kids to work in), enclosed by an elegant white picket fence and matching arbor. TOG also installed a tool shed, a potting bench, and a custom-built two-bin cedar composter. In addition to providing the Liguori family with luxuriant harvests of peas, greens and other crops, this garden is also proving to be a model of self-sufficiency: By spring 2009, the onsite composting operation will supply all the fertility needed to nourish the next season’s vegetables.