BlogHer - Edible Landscaping: How Does Thy Garden Grow? - Comments

Apples

KLinnea — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 03:51:35 -0500

Growing your own food is a wonderful experience. Read about a wonderful Japanese farmer in my blog: http//:themadhattersapprentice.blogspot.com/

He har made his garden the perfect wilderness it seems.

There is still hope!

Gardengrrrl — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 11:43:37 -0500

Great post! In many areas you may be correct about the lack of fruiting trees in suburia. It's sad because in only one or two generations we have lost a lot of knowledge about growing our own food and preserving it.

I do see a lot of reasons to be hopeful though. Here in Eugene the city is covered with apple trees laden with fruit, particularily in the older neighborhoods. The sad part is that most of that fruit seem to be going to waste.

There's a new movement afoot to revive the idea of "Victory Gardens" only with the intention of reducing our dependance on foreign oil. If you have read Omnivore's Dilemna, you know that big agri-business relies on oil not only for powering tractors and transporting the harvest, but many fertiziler's and pesticides are also made out of petro-chemicals.

There is also a new class of urban farmers and gardening coaches springing up to help folks learn how to grow their own food.

<a href="http://gardensong.net/">GardenSong - Getting Your Garden Growing! </a>

re: Deer and edible gardens

greentalk — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 13:15:50 -0500

For all of you who can plant without deer and wild life eatting you out of house and home, you are SO lucky.

I have a garden which is behind a 8 foot fence to keep everyone out since there would be nothing if I did not. Now I have to deal with crows who think my tomatoes are theirs!

I just planted apple trees and they are behind little fences but I know this year or next year, I will have to fence them all in. The deer nip at their buds.

I too have curly thyme as ground cover since you can walk on it. My oregano would be too tall to use as ground cover. I just discovered the most amazing plant. Chinese garlic chives. It blooms in late summer for us (NJ) and deer hate it. A must have!

Ever day, I eye a part of my land to rip up and plant. Some people buy clothing. I buy plants! Off to give the trees some kelp! Anna www.green-talk.com

Doing It In the Front Yard

Green Bean Dreams — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 11:41:47 -0500

Fantastic post!

I've gradually planted more and more edibles in my yard - starting with some tomatoes mixed into the flower beds and then some raised beds. And then I ran out of room . . . in my back yard. Helllooooo! My front yard is where all the sun is.

This year we grew pumpkins, peppers, potatoes, beans, greens, tomatoes and sunflowers in our front yard. In doing it, we not only reaped a bountiful harvest and shared some of our wealth with the finches and the squirrels. We got to know our neighbors. Our house became the favorite stop for a three year old girl a couple blocks over who loves to see how the squash and towering sunflowers are doing. I met gardeners from other cities who stop to share their experiences with me. And I'm eating some mighty fine produce.

Here are a few of my posts on edible gardening (particularly in the front yard):

http://greenbeandreams.blogspot.com/2008/07/from-bashful-to-bodacious.html

http://greenbeandreams.blogspot.com/2008/07/feasting-in-front-yard.html

Green Bean

www.greenbeandreams.blogspot.com

the dark side of edible gardening...

helen rogan — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 11:20:56 -0500

I'm all in favor of growing fruit and vegetables but nobody's mentioned the downside: protecting your carefully nurtured produce from the creatures that crave it. Squirrels nibbling in the peach tree, rabbits gnawing at the lettuce, birds poking around in the raspberry canes and, of course, the rampaging deer. When I was a child, my father nurtured an amazing assortment of fruits and vegetables and labored to keep the predators at bay with netting, abundant doses of DDT (those were the times!) and an occasional, furious shotgun blast from the dining room!!! I love fruit and veg. straight from the garden but don't relish the slaughter that's involved...

In my little shade garden, which you can read about at http://www.hallmarkmagazine.com/Life_Lines, we all sort of coexist, with an occasional sneak attack on the squirrels from my determined Norfolk terrier. Who can blame him? The pesky creatures wait until the red and orange buds on the tulips begin to show color, nip them off and leave them lying on the ground. So now I grow purple, pink and white ones instead!

love this idea

Mama Bird — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 20:11:42 -0500

I have a row house with a very small yard - mostly shaded bz of our (non fruit bearing) cherry tree. Intriguing idea though! For now we'll have to content ourselves with our community garden plot and my herbs/tomatoes/lettuce I grow on the sunny back wall of our house. I've been eyeing my neighbors' fig trees, though! Next year I will have to post a plea to freecycle. Looking fwd to checking out those links.

SurelyYouNest.com

Urban homesteading

KBestOliver — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 06:24:15 -0500

We're in the planning stages of converting part of our backyard into urban homestead space with raised planting boxes and some other food-growing devices (potato stacks, bean poles, etc), and part of the frontyard into edible landscaping. My only regret is when we plant fruit trees, we'll probably not reap much benefit from them, food-wise, since I doubt we'll live in this house our whole lives, but I'm definitely excited for berry bushes and much more homegrown produce.

Now if I was gutsy enough to get a few chickens...

Check out Kitchen Gardeners.org

Mary Clare Hunt — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 01:19:51 -0500

It's a wonderful site dedicated to kitcher gardens around the world.

Working towards this, slowly

Andrea Meyers — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 22:17:57 -0500

We are gradually turning our backyard into an edible garden, but it will take some time. As trees die off we plan to replace them with fruit trees (peaches, apples, cherries, plums), and we plan to add more vegetable and herb space in the coming years. We like eating our own organically grown produce, and growing our own food has been a great learning experience for our boys. They help me plant seeds, water the plants, and gather the harvest, and they have fun doing it! They also enjoy eating what we have grown.

Now if we could just convince the HOA to let us plant cover crops for the cold weather...

:-)

~Andrea,
Andrea's Recipes

Herbs as ground cover

Queenofwonder — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 22:12:03 -0500

Another thing I have been doing that I forgot to mention before is using herbs for ground cover. Oregano spreads nicely as does sage and thyme.

Come on, it's gonna be fun ... www.queenofwonder.com

Great Post

Kathy333 — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 20:22:38 -0500

We planted our first garden this year and have been having a great time picking our tomatoes, cucumbers, bell peppers, and especially a foot long zucchini! We are moving cross country in a month or so and plan to really sit down and map out a garden and landscape that will work for us over the next few years. I would love an avacado tree, as well as a lemon and orange. The kids have loved the garden, and it has been such a great family thing to do, as we all go out each night to check the veggies, water, pick the weeds, and bond.

Kathy

Mama Marathoner

Allbusiness:Working Mothers

growing your own food is fun!

Queenofwonder — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 18:50:31 -0500

Over the past four years I have been adding more edibles to the yard. When we bought the house there was a pear tree and a cherry tree. We have added an apricot, lemon, and a peach tree that had fruit this summer. Delicious! We just planted an apple tree too.

One large project my husband undertook was building 3 raised beds. I did some reading and learned about gardening by the square foot which is very interesting and non overwhelming way of dividing a raised bed- the creator of this method is Mel Bartholomew. http://www.squarefootgardening.com/. Since I have started using this method, we have had carrots, radishes, chard, kale, purple cabbage, onions, even garlic. I am soon going to harvest my first tomatoes. I love including my kids and it is a wonderful way to instill an appreciation of nature and a love of veggies. I often encourage them to eat a vegetable saying, it came from the garden, give it a try! They always try it!

I recently planted seeds for Winter Vegetables- mixed greens, chard, and arugula. I love to take my daily walks in the garden to check on the changes- there is always something!

Come on, it's gonna be fun ... www.queenofwonder.com

Edible Landscaping: How Does Thy Garden Grow?

Alanna Kellogg — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 17:29:53 -0500

"If Johnny Appleseed were to visit present-day suburbia, he would weep. In most yards, he would be likely to find not a fruit-laden apple tree, but a flowering crabapple, cherry, plum, or peach tree —- none bearing fruit." (Rosalind Creasy, 2008) Edible landscaping is the practice of growing food in aesthetically pleasing ways whether in suburbia, dense urban environments or wide open country spaces.

But edible landscaping is more than keeping a kitchen garden, usually a sunny plot with tomatoes, salad greens, a few vegetables and fresh herbs. Edible landscaping replaces messless shrubs and showy flowers with beautiful plants, shrubs and trees that bear edible fruit and nuts and leaves. It also returns unproductive land -- our yards -- to producing food.

The grande dame of edible landscaping is Rosalind Creasy, author of the 1982 tome The Complete Book of Edible Landscaping which is out of print and sells, used, for $60 and up. Luckily for those of us who live online, Ros is writing for OrganicToBe.org, where her posts are long and detailed.

Excerpt: "I cannot overemphasize the potential for beauty that landscaping with edibles holds, since many people still have difficulty accepting this notion. I came to understand this potential by experimenting in my own yard, in the process relearning the joys of eating fresh-picked peas, vine-ripened tomatoes, and sun-warmed apricots. I purchased dozens of different varieties of vegetables to plant in my food garden but also to interplant in my flower garden. Red cabbage with its colorful foliage, string beans with purple flowers, the many varieties of lettuce with their interesting leaf patterns, artichokes with their gray-green, fernlike foliage and magnificent blue thistles, and the heavenly purple globes of the eggplant were extremely effective in my standard flower bed." ~ read Creating Bountiful Yards with Organic Edible Landscaping

Excerpt: "I’ve seen it happen time and time again. People who are on a tight budget think they cannot afford to spend a lot of money on the landscaping; so they go to the nursery, buy a package of grass seed, and turn most of their yard into a large lawn. There are few things you can do, particularly in the West, that will cost you more over the long run. A lawn will nickel and dime you to death. Lawn mower, gas for the mower, lawn-mower maintenance, edger, water, sprinkler repairs, fertilizer, herbicides, fungicides, vacation maintenance: all for just a humdrum lawn. And a show-place lawn can cost you many hundreds of dollars a year. A well-maintained lawn needs to be aerated, thatched, reseeded, and top dressed every year. All of those expenses are just the tip of the iceberg. They don’t even take into account that the lawn area could be covered with money-saving plants that would provide food for the table." ~ read More Food, Less Lawn: Save Money with an Edible Landscaping Plan

What about we bloggers, are we using edible landscapes yet?

"When we bought our house, the back forty (feet, that is) was absolutely disgusting: a flea-infested dirt-pit and dog-toilet, dominated by a sterile avocado tree, a junk fruit tree, a bottlebrush tree, and a badly overgrown magnolia. The avocado was as tall as the house and leaning dangerously, the “fruit” tree produced small cherry-like things that tasted awful, and the bottlebrush was also as tall as the house and sported a canopy at least 20 feet wide." ~ When Anita and Cameron moved into a new home in the Bay Area, the back yard was a big mess and a top priority. Read about their edible landscaping experiement in Summer in the Garden from Married with Dinner

"Gardening is a great way to help your food budget as well as give you a little exercise in return. My husband has decided to do more edible landscaping and as such, you won't see very many flowers in my yard or gardening areas. I love them but he wants them to be edible." ~ Read Garden Pics from Laura Williams' Musings

BlogHer food editor Alanna Kellogg tries to collect plums from a backyard plum tree for Dimply Plum Cake. Who gets there first?