Foodscaping

Practical and Innovative Ways to Create an Edible Landscape

Charlie Nardozzi

• Editore: Cool Springs Press
• Anno: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781627886321
• Argomento: Ciencias biológicas
• Categoria: Horticultura

Keep your lawn and eat it too - Foodscaping will show you how to grow food without giving up your view.

Foodscaping is what it sounds like - a combination of landscaping and food. This gardening resource is chock-full of real-world examples, photos, and advice so that even an "average Joe" homeowner and gardener can grow food without sacrificing either their lawn or their home's appearance to do so.

While "edible" and "ornamental" aren't always synonymous, they can be combined, with the right plants, placement, and advice from author and edible gardening expert Charlie Nardozzi. Charlie's ideas allow you to add food plants wherever you like. Incorporating food-bearing plants as hedgerows and barriers or in small spaces, containers, window boxes and many more ideas allow you to expand the types of plants you can use and even extend your growing season!

For example, blueberry bushes provide not just fruit, but also wonderful fall color. Arbors and pergolas are perfect supports for edible plants and even simplify harvest. Squash and cabbage have attractive, interesting leaf textures, so they can be a part of the ornamental garden.

Foodscaping also goes beyond mere plant selection. The basics of gardening, planting, pruning, dealing with pests, watering, feeding, and harvesting are all covered in detail, ensuring your success in creating a beautiful, edible landscape for your home.

CHAPTER 1

Ways and Places to Grow Food

Growing some of your own food is an important way to stay healthy, create better communities, and preserve our planet. But it also can seem like a daunting task. You may not be up for tilling a big area for a vegetable garden or have the room to include a small orchard or berry planting. That’s okay. The focus of this book is on creating a foodscape.

Foodscaping is a combination of “landscaping” and “food” to create an edible landscape. A foodscape is really a lens with which you can re-imagine your yard. So instead of just looking for the open, sunny area for a big garden or orchard, you start seeing the possibilities of growing food everywhere in your landscape. Sometimes it will be a large edible patch, but often it might be a section or part of your existing landscape. Not only does this help fit edible plants more easily in your yard, it also allows you to keep and improve the beauty, style, and design of your landscape.

I’m always amazed at the places gardeners find to plant edibles. The keys to growing them successfully, which we’ll cover later in this book, include sun, soil, and location. By thinking creatively, you can grow vegetables on a fire escape, fruits in a container, and edible flowers up a wall. This section is all about the possibilities. I want to show you where in your yard edible plants can grow.

Many of these edibles are beautiful plants too, so you won’t be sacrificing looks for food. While we all know tomatoes, basil, and apples are some of the most popular edibles to grow, I like emphasizing some of the lesser-grown or -eaten edibles too. These are attractive and produce delicious food for you and your family.

Foodscaping 101

Somewhere in our past we got the idea that gardens should be separated by type: flower, vegetable, and herb. In the foodscape yard, these distinctions are blurred. Edibles and flowers can be perfect bedmates. Even with the boom in vegetable gardening the last ten years or so, far more gardeners grow flowers than vegetables or other edible plants. I love flowers as much as the next gardener, but I also believe many edible plants in the foodscape are equally beautiful. That’s why I encourage everyone to grow edible flowers and beautiful vegetables and herbs together in the flower garden.

Top Ten Underrated Edibles

Let’s start looking for places to tuck some edibles into your yard to transform your landscape into a vibrant foodscape. But first, let me share with you some of my favorite underrated foodscape plants to mix into your yard and gardens.

Alpine strawberry

Currant/gooseberry

Eggplant

Elderberry

Kale

Leeks

Parsley

Peppers

Serviceberry

Sweet potato

By selecting the right varieties of vegetables, such as red cabbage, and growing them in groups, you can create a visual effect similar to a bed of annual flowers.

Edibles in Flower Gardens

There are a few ways to use foodscape plants in the annual and perennial flower gardens. You can plant attractive vegetables and herbs such as hot pepper, eggplant, Swiss chard, basil, parsley, chives, and leeks into the flower garden as you would any flowering plant. Many of these edible plants have beautiful flowers, leaf colors and textures, and fruits that bring color and interest to the garden. Some—hot pepper, squash, and eggplant—can stand alone with their beauty, while others—basil, leeks, parsley, and Swiss chard—look best grouped together. As with flowers, don’t just consider the vegetable’s or herb’s flower and fruit color. Consider its leaves as well. The foliage of some veggies, such as the blue-green spiky leaves of leeks, create a nice contrast to other foliage and blooms.

Borders along driveways and walkways often are filled with colorful annual and perennial flowers. Since these are places we walk by daily, they’re a perfect location to grow foodscape plants such as yellow zucchini and peppers. Food is added without sacrificing beauty.

One of the benefits of vegetables and herbs is they are mostly annuals, so many flowers look good all summer long. But some vegetables, such as colorful lettuces, peas, and radishes, will be harvested in early summer or fall and won’t last all season. Instead of letting their harvest leave a hole in your flower garden, consider planting more flowers or edibles to fill the space and produce color and food.

If you don’t want to sacrifice too much of your flower garden to vegetables and herbs, consider growing edible flowers. Pansies, violas, nasturtiums, calendula, and bee balm are some of the traditional flowers that double as edibles for their flowers. These plants are beautiful and tasty.

Perennial flower gardens often look best with some anchoring shrubs or small trees in them. This is a perfect opportunity to incorporate blueberry, currant, elderberry, and other edible shrubs into the garden. Some varieties of these common edible shrubs, such as ‘Black Lace’ elderberry, have attractive, colorful leaves that contrast well with the flowers. Plus, they still yield delicious, edible berries. Growing a dwarf cherry or peach tree in or near a flower garden creates a strong statement and helps define the space. It can provide some welcome shade for plants in warm climates, especially from the hot, midsummer afternoon sun. You can use the fruit tree as an opportunity to grow shade-loving annuals, such as impatiens and begonias, underneath it. Consider growing groundcover herbs, such as mint and thyme, under open-canopy trees as well. When these plants flower they attract beneficial insects that will help thwart pests on your fruit trees. When you walk over them, they emit a pleasant fragrance.

Another benefit of incorporating vegetables, herbs, and fruits into the flower gardens is safety for your plants. By spreading out the locations of your edible plants, they are less likely to be attacked by insects, diseases, and animals. Even if a rabbit finds one patch of peas, it may not find the other patches scattered in another part of the flower garden.

We normally think of planting shrubs or perennial flowers against our house. But the East, South, or West side of your house is a perfect place to grow foodscape plants. The house protects edibles from wind and cold and collects heat so the plants mature faster. Add height by trellising up vining plants such as cucumbers.

Edibles as Foundation Plants

Most modern landscapes have shrubs and small trees planted along the house. These are considered foundation plants because they were originally meant to hide the concrete foundation from view. They also soften the hard angles of a house and create a more inviting feel. Most new homes are built and landscaped with a minimum of some foundation plants to dress up the look. Some common foundation plants include yews, junipers, arborvitae, lilac, burning bush, spirea, azalea, dogwood, eugenia, and pittosporum. While these foundation plants are attractive, the space around your home can be used for so much more.

Many edible shrubs and trees can be grown as foundation plants. Not only do they give you the obvious advantage of having attractive leaves, flowers, and fruits, the plants are right outside your door. This makes for easier picking (imagine grabbing a handful of blueberries or some sprigs of rosemary on your way into the house after work), and makes them easier to protect from pests and harsh weather.

When substituting an edible shrub for a purely ornamental one, consider the sun exposure, wind, hardiness zones, and soil conditions. Most fruiting shrubs need full sun to produce fruit or berries. If you’re growing them on a south-facing exposure, however, it may get too hot for the flowers and proper pollination. If you have an east- or west-facing area and are concerned that fruiting shrubs, such as blueberries and currants, won’t grow and fruit well there for lack of sun, consider growing shrubs with edible leaves instead. Rosemary (yes, it can be shrub-sized) is a good example.

You also don’t have to replace all your foundation shrubs with edible ones. Many edible shrubs are compatible with ornamental ones. For example, blueberries, rhododendrons, and azaleas all like an acidic soil. Low-growing currants and gooseberries can fit in a small space. They match well with other low-growing shrubs such as potentilla. You can even plant specialty trees, such as columnar apples or espaliered pears, to fit in a foundation planting along your home. Just be sure they fit the spot. This is an important aspect of foundation plants. Often homeowners or builders plant shrubs and trees that look good now in a landscape. Plants grow, however. Landscapers sometimes forget what a landscape might look like in five or ten years. The same is true in a foodscape. Remember what the ultimate height of your shrubs and trees will be, and plant accordingly. There’s nothing worse than having to prune back a fruiting blueberry bush because it’s growing into a window or walkway.

By growing in raised beds along your house, you can maximize the space you have to grow edibles in your foodscape. Keeping tall plants, such as tomatoes and cucumbers, trellised vertically creates even more space to grow.

Just look at the riot of color a foodscape can produce. Colorful Swiss chard, kale, purple basil, marigolds and petunias all create a mixed flower and edible border that pops. Add structural elements such as containers, trellises, fences and statues and you’ve created an attractive garden vignette.

It doesn’t have to just be shrubs and trees that you plant along your foundation. Any attractive foundation plantings will have a mix of plants. Consider mixing in some tough perennials, such as rhubarb, or edible groundcovers, such as alpine strawberries.

Foundation plantings can include shade and flowering trees ...