Edible Landscaping Your Front Yard - Start Now

Striking ornamental kale can be planted among edible kale

Fall is just ahead and it’s the perfect time for bold action: adding edibles to your suburban front yard. If you have a conventionally landscaped front yard and you aren’t sure how to begin, here are some ideas to help you get started.

Getting Started

For the front yard there is still an aesthetic norm to overcome in lawn-centric suburbia, but that convention has been shifting steadily.  Growing vegetables, herbs, and fruit boldly in plain sight needn’t be the eyesore of the neighborhood if you give some thought to how they will fit into your garden design. In my opinion, both edible and ornamental plants coexist in a beautifully in a garden. It doesn’t have to be one or the other.

America spinach with violets

To start, you'll have to consider the exposure to direct sunlight, at least 4-6 hours per day, and the condition of the soil. Check with your local UC Master Gardeners for more details on planting and soil prep for your region. They will also have seasonal planting charts. Sign up for their excellent monthly newsletter that reminds you about seasonal garden tasks, including planting edibles.

Below are some simple ideas for small additions with the potential for a big impact.

Where to Add Edibles Now

Flower Beds and Borders:

If you have existing flowerbeds, that’s a great place to begin. If not, you might consider removing a strip or patch of lawn to make a combined flower and edibles bed. This would be nice as border along a walkway or fence, or even in the center of a lawn (remove and prepare a square or round shaped patch). Small shrubby herbs such as thyme (choose from lemon or lime thyme) or sage (add a trio of culinary sage with blue-gray leaves, tri-color sage edged with purple, cream and green, and yellow sage) fit well among flowers, and they hold up to the mild frosts in our San Francisco Bay Area. Rosemary is a popular, large landscaping plant that is covered with sweet blue-lavender or purplish flowers for months of the year. 

Trailing rosemary is attractive, fragrant, and great for cooking

You can easily slip in vegetable seedlings when planting out flowering annuals or among bulbs.  Spinach, lettuces, kale (including ornamental kale), and Asian greens, can be grown in fall since they prefer cooler temperatures and can be grown during winter in our region. These leafy green veggies will add attractive foliage to a bed of flowers, and if you really want to be on your game, plant edible and beneficial flowers, such as calendulas, and add nasturtiums and marigolds for summer.

The viola family, which includes violets and pansies, are good cool weather choices for fall and are high impact for their varied colors. This group is semi-perennial in mild winter climates and provides lots of blooms fall through spring, going dormant in hot summer weather (some will reseed). For annuals such as nasturtiums, which are frost tender, wait until spring. But beware: if you buy nursery seedlings make sure they were grown without pesticides and herbicides, otherwise, don't eat the flowers!

Artichokes have spectacular foliage, but need space

Go Big and Bold with Artichokes

If you have the space for them, artichokes are a spectacular addition to the garden. Their bold foliage is striking, and in spring they'll reward you with edible artichoke heads. I particularly love the violet ones, such as Violetto and Purple of Romagna. Romanesco is a tightly rounded variety that is tinged with purple. The green globe types have equally beautiful foliage. Fall through early summer is the best time for artichokes. They tend to go dormant with the heat of summer, at this point you can cut them back and keep them mulched. Mine are shaded in the later part of the afternoon for the hot sun so they begin to sprout new growth if I water them occasionally during summer. Towards fall they really start to bulk up.

All of them will eventually yield huge flowers with purple stamens if you leave the heads on the plants. I always leave a few to flower, then watch the bees enjoy them!

Artichokes will eventually explode with purple flowers if they aren't harvested

Containers:

Planting into containers is another great way to experiment with edibles since containers can be moved around, grouped in different locations or used as a welcoming feature on a porch. Numerous colors, sizes, shapes and textures are available to match or brighten up your existing landscape. Containers filled with flowers and lettuce are sure to be a conversation piece. For the coming cool months you could pair lettuce, kale, or spinach, in containers with edible flowers for a beautiful display. Mix with ornamental kale for an extra showy focal piece.

Showy heirlooms: Dwarf Gray Sugar Peas date back to 1892

Trellises:

I also love growing snap peas and snow peas over winter and early spring. They are beautiful on a trellis, and you can plant flowers and leafy greens around them. I have several different trellises in the front yard of different types and sizes for climbing edibles. Lovely bicolored Dwarf Gray Sugar Peas resemble sweet pea flowers (which are NOT edible) and would be a winning combination with cool season flowers in your front yard.

Start Small, But Start Now

Eating sweet crisp pea pods with fresh salad greens and herbs, plus edible flowers from your own front yard may inspire you to expand your edible landscape into a beautiful productive kitchen garden by the time spring rolls around. A good approach is to start gradually. You can start this fall by adding these varieties that will overwinter well, then plan to add warm season edibles in spring and summer. Enjoy learning as you grow, gather ideas about what you enjoy growing and eating, and design features you’d like to add. If you are new to growing vegetables and herbs, getting some experience first will help shape your overall landscaping goals.

Note: during our cool and rainy months in California you will have to have a plan for slug and snail control. Handpicking in the early morning or evenings is effective if you keep at it. You can supplement handpicking with a sprinkle of  a non-toxic product such as Sluggo.

A earlier version of this post was published in March 1, 2012 at Eat Drink Better

Photos: Patricia Larenas, Urban Artichoke

Pickled Nasturtium Pods

I love nasturtiums not only for their vibrant bright colors and unusual saucer-like foliage, there is simply so much to love: they grow easily and reseed themselves every year, plus their leaves, flowers, and seed pods are all edible. I often sprinkle the flower petals on our salads to add gorgeous color and I’ve been adding the young leaves for a bit of peppery zest.

A nasturtium pod with a flower bud in the background

The green seed pods (pictured above) are crunchy and surprisingly peppery too- try one right off the plant, but you have been warned! You can find lots of recipes for pickling them to use in place of capers since this has been done for literally centuries.

I found a recipe in The Forgotten Art of Growing Gardening and Cooking with Herbs, by RichardM. Bacon, (Yankee INC,  1972). It’s a wonderful book I discovered recently at my local used bookstore, packed with useful information.

The instructions are minimal: in a quart jar combine 1 tablespoon salt, 2 cups wine vinegar, 1 clove of garlic. Fill with green nasturtium pods, seal, and store 1 month before using.

But I challenge anyone to find enough nasturtium pods to fill an entire quart jar- then to actually use them! So I found Linda Ziedrich's method much more doable. She 's the author of  The Joy of Pickling.

She combines 1/2 cup cider vinegar and 1/2 teaspoon salt in a small jar, stirs to dissolve the salt, and adds the green pods.  She has even added fresh pods to the jar throughout the growing season.  She doesn't refrigerate the jar, but personally, I'm cautious, so I'd refrigerate them just to be on the safe side.

Empress of India Nasturtium

Do you have a favorite nasturtium recipe? I'd like to know- I have lots of them growing!

This post was published on Eat Drink Better

Photos: Patricia Larenas, Urban Artichoke

Ten Essential Herbs for Your Edible Landscape

Herbs planted in and around a planter box used for growing vegetables

I can’t say enough about the benefits of edible landscaping with herbs. A huge benefit for my husband and me is purely culinary: we love to cook. Fresh herbs are expensive at the grocery store and not always available. Having fresh herbs just outside our door for picking at a moment’s notice is a perk we have come to take for granted; hardly a day passes where I’m not out picking fresh rosemary, parsley, or tarragon, for our meals.

But there is another equally important reason for incorporating herbs into your edible landscape.

 

Companion Planting with Herbs

Herbs do double-duty in the garden. They are essential to the home chef, but they also contribute to a healthy garden ecosystem. Companion planting is the old (some say ancient) technique of planting certain herbs, vegetables, and other plants in close proximity so that one or both benefits from the presence of the other.

Sage and thyme

The benefits come through different mechanisms: through the root system by sharing nutrients, or through beneficial secretions, (exudate), by stimulating microbes or bringing nutrients up to the soil surface, attracting pollinators with flowers, and deterring pests through herbal scents.

Some benefits that have been observed are still mysterious, for example, the observation that basil improves the flavor of tomatoes when grown together. Companion planting can be complex and highly technical, but it can be distilled to a few basic herbs that will benefit your garden and kitchen.

A Calendula flower

10 Favorite Beneficial Garden Herbs

The following is a short list of popular culinary herbs that are reputed to be broadly beneficial in the garden. A good strategy would be to plant these in several spots near and among your vegetables. You'll have to plan on semi-permanent locations (edges of planting beds) for the perennials which will grow year-round in climates with mild winters, or will die back and sprout anew in spring if protected from freezing. Try growing the annuals from seed; many of them self seed for the next year.

1. Basil (Ocimum basilicum)- an annual; companion to tomatoes, improves growth and flavor; flowers attract bees.

2. Borage (Borago officinalis)- an annual with edible blue flowers  that attracts bees; companion to tomatoes, squash, and strawberries, and deters tomato worm.

3. Calendula (a.k.a. pot marigold; Calendula officinalis)- annuals and perennials; a good companion for tomatoes but is said to be good for the garden in general to deter pests, especially tomato worms and asparagus beetles. Flower petals are good in salads and used as an antiseptic in ointments.

4. Chamomile (Chamaemelum nobile)-a perennial; companion to cabbage and onions; the tea useful against "damping off", a fungal disease.

5. French Marigold (Tagetes patula)- an annual; a garden standard for deterring pests, including nematodes; the Mexican marigold (Tagetes minuta)is toxic to many plants but highly effective against many nematodes).

6. Nasturtium (Tropaeolum majus)- an annual related to watercress with colorful edible flowers, leaves, and buds; use as a decoy for aphids, deters some beetles. Climbing and mounding forms (I prefer the mounding type).

7. Oregano (Origanum vulgare)-  a perennial; highly aromatic;has beneficial effect on surrounding plants.

8. Rosemary (Rosmarinus officinalis) - a highly aromatic woody perennial with bush or sprawling forms; in mild climates will grow all year-round and the small blue flowers attract bees and provide forage in winter; deters cabbage moths, bean beetles.

9. Tarragon (Artemisia dracunculus)- a frost tender perennial herb; mulch during winter; beneficial throughout the garden.

10. Marjoram (Origanum majorana)-  a perennial that has a beneficial effect on surrounding plants, and improves flavor.

Thyme, rosemary, and lavender drying on our dining table

See the following reference for more information on companion planting (used as a reference for this post):

How to Grow More Vegetables, Jeavons, J., 7th ed., Ten Speed Press, Berkeley, CA., 2006

This post was also published at Eat Drink Better

Photos: Urban Artichoke

Useful Tips for Avoiding Jail Time while Vegetable Gardening in Your Front Yard

Grow flowers among your veggies

One of the Important Media blogs, Eat Drink Better, just wrote about a Michigan family who is being threatened with financial penalties and jail time for simply growing vegetables in their own front yard.

I am very much in favor of working to change such local laws that are misguided and often outdated; but in the meantime, the following tips may help keep you out of handcuffs.

So before you get caught picking cucumbers in your front yard, are slapped with a fine, and charged with a misdemeanor, here are some strategies you can try to disguise your subversive gardening acts. You can always resort to planting edible flowers and herbs among the veggies in your front yard, and Big Brother will be none the wiser.

Grow Edibles that Double as Ornamental Plants

I have Scarlet Runner Beans growing up an attractive trellis in my front yard. The showy scarlet flowers with lush green foliage attract attention and people are shocked to learn that,  yes,  they are also an edible heirloom bean.

Edible flowers: Calendula and Borage with salad greens

Plant Edible Flowers and Herbs

I love flowers so I plant them among my vegetables. There are many attractive edible flowers, including several that are grown strictly as ornamental plants: calendula, the violet family (including Johnny jump-ups, violas and pansies), roses, chrysanthemums, and nasturtiums, to name a few. Edible flowers make colorful additions to salads and desserts, and rose petals have many uses. For starters, you can make rosewater, sugared rose petals, and rose petal jam...

Read the full post on Ecolocalizer