It seems like more folks are interested in growing their own veggies and fruits than ever before. Growing your own food at home can be a wonderful journey: we learn more about plants, about our environment and climate, and about how we fit into all of it. While a traditional in-ground vegetable garden, fruit trees, and a raised bed or two can be a great way to get started, some gardeners have other needs. Space might be restricted—maybe you don’t have a back yard—or you may have an HOA that prohibits growing produce in your front lawn. For those who prefer a mode of veggie gardening that’s a bit more discreet, there’s a solution in the form of edible landscaping. Edible landscaping is just what it sounds like—creating landscaping features around your home that are both tasteful and tasty, looking visually appealing while producing food. So let’s dig in and learn more about edible landscaping and how you can bring it to life in your garden space!
What is Edible Landscaping, Exactly?
At its core, edible landscaping is the art and craft of creating decorative landscaping that also produces plants that we can eat. It’s way of making your landscaping more than just aesthetic; it now creates something you can use. This is both more environmentally friendly and more self-sufficient, so edible landscaping appeals to a wide variety of gardeners, homesteaders, homeowners, and activists. It’s great for those of us with HOAs or other restrictions, and it opens up vegetable gardening to new spaces and new places.
Edible landscaping can take many forms: some folks just grow herbs and leafy greens, which blend in well with most garden spaces. Some add berry bushes and shrubs that produce fruit or edible nuts. Some find ways to blend traditional garden veggies into a tastefully constructed landscape. How you construct your edible landscape depends on your space, your climate, and your goals, so feel free to take the ideas you like, make them your own, and build the edible landscape you want or need.
Creating Edible Landscaping in Your Garden
The basics of edible landscaping in your garden or yard are really just like the basics of creating any garden space. You have to get to know the space you have—where the sun goes, the drainage, how much rain it gets, what the soil is like—and then plan what you want to do with and around that. Every space is different and every gardener is different, but we can make a few suggestions to help get you started with edible landscaping.
First, consider perennial bushes and shrubs as a way of dipping your toe into edible landscaping. There are many edible perennials that take this form—sage, rosemary, and lavender are all useful kitchen herbs that are also attractive shrubs or bushes. They can be easily pruned into the shape you want, are lovely on their own, and able to blend into most landscaping. Likewise, blueberry bushes can fit in just about anywhere, are easily kept trimmed or pruned, and with a little care produce delicious fruit. Your local garden club or nursery can probably recommend edible perennials that will look and taste great in your landscaping scheme.
From there, we’d like to suggest dwarf fruit and nut trees as a wonderful addition to any landscaping. Dwarf varietals can be less than 10 feet tall and very handsome trees. They can provide shade and visual interest; some have lovely flowers in the spring as well. They can also produce fruits like apples, figs, pears, plums, and cherries in addition to nuts like filberts. If your space and your requirements allow, consider finding a dwarf fruit tree that’s well suited to your environment and giving it a try!
Trellis gardening is generally allowed in most HOAs, creates visual interest in a landscaping space, and allows us to grow plants upward thus making otherwise unusable spaces accessible. It’s also a great way to create some edible landscaping; all sort of edible plants love to vine and climb, so a trellis or two can be just the trick to adding edible plants to your yard, lawn, or home garden. Grapes, kiwis, raspberry, and blackberry can all be grown this way, as can annual veggies like cucumbers, melons, and squash. With a little care and upkeep, your trellis garden could be a great source of delicious fruits and veggies while also blending into your landscaping.
Hiding in plain site is another option, one that requires us to be a bit more considered in our garden design. Vegetables like asparagus, rhubarb, and celery grow relatively upright and can slide into garden beds among other perennials without being too obvious. Container gardens on a patio or porch can have a few containers devoted to tomatoes or zucchini. Decorative borders can contain decorative varietals of peppers or kale that also happen to be edible. The sky is the limit if you have the time to get creative, so if your space and lifestyle allows consider what you can do with your own secret garden.
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: at Gardzen we believe gardening is for everyone, and that now matter what your space is like you can probably grow something. We hope this brief guide to edible landscaping helps you think of some ways to grow food in your own space now matter what sort of restrictions you have. We also hope you’ll send some photos or stories and let us know how it works out—you can reach us via email or in the comments!
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