If you’ve ever wanted to start your vegetable garden, you’ve probably spent many hours reading books and watching videos. But this content, sometimes generalist, may not be adapted to your situation. To come to your rescue, 8 web-loving gardeners have decided to come together to create the Terra-potager horticultural platform.
Their goal? Offer an interactive sowing calendar that matches your climate and a planning tool to draw your entire vegetable garden, articles, videos, podcasts and everything you need to produce your vegetables at their best. The team behind Terra-potager tells us more about this site created by and for gardeners, from beginners to the most experienced. Discovery!
Who are you and what do you do?
We are 8 vegetable garden enthusiasts, from very different backgrounds, some of which are no longer present in the gardening world: Le Potager d’Olivier, Maud du jardin d’Alekil or Antoine le Potagiste, followed by hundreds of thousands of people on the internet.
Antoine is the developer of the website, Guillaume is responsible for the content, as are Olivier and the other gardeners.
Can you introduce us? your project †
Terra-potager originated from the observation that learning the vegetable garden requires many theories (books, videos), but with very little concrete and exhaustive experience from gardeners. Often these are general concepts, without incarnation, without adaptation to the climate, without managing the many dangers of an organic vegetable garden.
The typical example is a seed slot that can be found on the back of tomato bags, ie “sowing from mid-February to mid-May”. The novice gardener does not know what to do with such an indication. For example, the Terra-potager platform is articulated around an innovative, interactive multi-climate sowing calendar, full of gardeners’ experiences. The latter provides all the precise data for sowing, planting and harvesting, regardless of your context.
For each climate we find the experience of a season in the vegetable garden embodied by one of the gardeners of 8. Do you want to know, for example, what to do in March in the Paris region? You just have to go to the climate of Élodie, which represents this climate, to find all the dates of sowing, transplanting, planting, harvesting and materials to use.
Terra-potager also allows you to create your own calendar by taking inspiration from existing calendars and adapting them to your vegetable garden. You create your own experience by being inspired by that of experts and expert gardeners.
In addition, there are hundreds of videos on the platform to illustrate all the gestures of the gardener in the vegetable garden. From sowing carrots, through planting tomatoes, to sowing beans, every gesture of the gardener is caught in immersion, mid-season, in an eye-catching reality. This will give you a very concrete idea of how to approach it in your vegetable garden.
You can also draw your entire vegetable garden with the planning tool, dream of enlargements, calculate the place of each crop, prepare the associations and rotations of each space. You create a whole history that you can duplicate or adapt for the following seasons.
And then Terra-potager is all editorial content, articles over the weeks. There are also podcasts, cooking recipes and a weekly news feed written by 8 leading gardeners from different climates to bring the calendar to life and guide you through the season.
You also have a Facebook group that brings together thousands of gardeners who help each other and share their experiences. Terra-potager therefore offers you the most concrete and compelling view of a season in the vegetable garden.
Why did you decide to embark on this adventure?
Above all, to provide a concrete and compelling “reality” of the organic vegetable garden. Too much content is often idealized, not exhaustive, with sometimes even esoteric deviations that confuse the gardener who becomes confused when he sees that nothing is happening as predicted. Terra-potager wants to be centered on the soil, the soil, the respect and the respect of the gardener. All this articulated around a platform that brings together extremely complete, accurate, detailed, interactive calendars, guiding any gardener to all the information he wishes to obtain.
Indeed, with our calendar, subscribers can access not only sowing dates, but also all cultivation movements, all stages, all routes from sowing to harvesting, all with one click.
We take our subscribers by the hand to help them grow some of their food.
The whole calendar is customizable, you can change all dates, all cultivation routes, enter your purchases, your actions in the garden: sowing, planting, weeding or other. The calendar turns into a real gardener’s diary, in which he can set reminder dates and manage his plot.
What message do you want to convey with your action?
That it is easy and possible to grow some of your vegetables even on a small area. That creating a vegetable garden nevertheless requires notions, knowledge, and adaptation to the climate, which must be taken into account. If you have an in-ground vegetable garden of several tens of square meters, you can produce a little all year round! As long as you don’t forget about seedlings 😉 This is exactly our proposal. And whether you are on a terrace, balcony or in the ground, at least you will be able to obtain crops.
After all, there are as many ways to garden as there are gardeners. Terra-potager wants to be benevolent and tolerant of the diversity of practices, as long as they respect the biology of the soil, the earth (zero pesticides, fungicides, herbicides and synthetic fertilizers). The Facebook group with thousands of members is a perfect example of this, with respect for everyone regardless of the topics discussed, sometimes sensitive topics like fighting pests that need to be eliminated or accepted in their vegetable garden.
you wish make your own vegetable garden † Go to the Terra-potager website to see the interactive sowing calendars and everyone else suggested sources through the platform!