Visit 11 Edible Gardens on the Edible Landscaping Tour

A lush front yard with squashes and watermelons among the flowers

The rampant abundance of delicious summer crops may have you daydreaming about how to add more vegetables and fruits to your home garden. Going on a local self-guided tour of unique and notable suburban edible landscapes is a fantastic way to get inspired with great ideas and a perfect opportunity to meet enthusiastic gardeners who love sharing their gardens. 

Here on the San Francisco Peninsula we are fortunate indeed to have Common Ground’s annual Edible Landscaping Tour coming up on July 20th, now in its 7th year. 

An apple espaliered on a fence is attractive and a good use of space

I've been on the organizing committee for several years now and I'm always delighted by the innovative ways that gardeners incorporate food plants, raising chickens, ducks, rabbits and bees on their suburban lots. Some take a decidedly urban farm approach, while others integrate fruit trees and vegetable gardens into their otherwise ornamental landscapes.

Keeping chickens and beehives is no longer rare in suburbia

Either way, each garden is beautiful, interesting and a reflection of the family's lifestyle and their quest to create a higher quality of life right at home.

Beans displayed on a teepee of bamboo poles

And it's a natural step to spread goodwill and delight by sharing extra fruit, eggs and beans with neighbors and friends. 
 

A young girl cuddling her chicken

From my perspective, gardening is not just a pleasant leisure-time activity, it’s critical for a healthy future. 

It's about:

•  building a supportive community around growing food organically and sustainably in our suburban neighborhoods.  
• understanding where our foods comes from and connecting with the Earth's processes that support this almost magical ability.

Grape vines on this pergola create an outdoor dining room

When I visit these gardens I see simple everyday acts that have deep meaning and far reaching consequences.

Vegetable beds decorated with children's tiles

When I reflect on all of the trouble in our world, these simple positive acts seem like a profound way to add much needed joy at a very basic level. 

That's why the Edible Landscape Tour is at the top of my "must do" list every summer!

Photos: Patricia Larenas, Urban Artichoke

Urban Artichoke on Earth911 and Huff Po

Good job Alexis! 

Last week Alexis Petru interviewed me for her article 5 Simple Ways to Start Growing Edibles for Earth911 and the post got picked up by the Huffington Post.

I love to see that people are excited about growing their own beautiful food to share with family and friends.  And it's not that we have to grow everything we eat to feel good about edible gardening - I still love my weekly trip to the farmer's market and I know that our small local growers value my support.

So take advantage of the season and go get dirty!

Gorgeous Violetto artichokes

Photo: Patricia Larenas

My Interview with a Guerrilla Grafter

Gardening is a very profound activity in many ways, and I believe that gardeners have the power for positive change for the greater good.

When I interviewed one of the Guerrilla Grafters recently, I learned that it’s not all about the grafting. This founding member of the Guerrilla Grafters cares deeply about the society in which we live and our relationship with public spaces. Their grafting experiments are a proof of concept for connecting residents with their city.

Read my post at: Eat Drink Better

Be Your Own Seed Bank: How to Save Seeds

My saved seeds from the lovely Hidatsa Shield Figure bean

As we celebrate World Food Day on October 24th, I’m especially thankful for one of life’s most precious gifts: seeds. Seeds are magical and mysterious in that our future rests in them. Without the thousands of varieties of useful plants we cultivate for their products, human civilization would simply cease. We could no longer feed ourselves nor our animals.

Preventing the extinction of a wide variety of food plants is not just romantic and historically interesting, it’s a matter of ensuring a healthy future for humanity. As industrial agriculture becomes increasingly focused on growing fewer and fewer varieties of food plants, home gardeners play an unexpected important role in propagating and saving old varieties of vegetables, fruit, and herbs by continuing to grow them, sharing the seeds and providing the seeds to organizations such as Seed Savers Exchange. Native Seeds Search is another important seed stewarding organization- they specialize in crops of arid regions (South Western USA), and prioritize providing heritage seeds to Native Americans.

Label your saved seeds carefully; you'll be thankful when its planting time!

Seed Saving Basics
If you have never had the pleasure of saving seeds and planting them the next season you are missing one of life’s simple and deeply gratifying pleasures. Fall signals the prime time for saving seeds and it is not difficult for many popular garden plants; all you need to know are a few basics. Try starting with easy seeds such as beans, nasturtiums, and basil, for example.

First, remember that the plant you intend to save seeds from must be an open pollinated type and not a hybrid. If it is an heirloom type it is open pollinated.

Follow these key steps:

1) Make sure you let the seeds stay on the plant until they reach full maturity. For example: if you pick bean pods while they are still green you may as well eat them, because the seeds won’t germinate!

2) Let mature seed pods or flower heads dry on the plant as much as possible. The timing is tricky in some cases because you need to collect the pod or flower head before it begins to release its seeds. In general, wild plants disperse seeds very efficiently with clever spring-loaded pods (poppies) or flower heads that fall apart readily to be transported by animals or blown away (dandelions). Domesticated agricultural plants were bred and selected for seed collection and for food harvesting, so the pods stay intact.

3) After collection and harvesting the seed pods or flower heads must dried completely. This is very important to prevent mold and spoilage. I like to keep my harvested collection in an open container in the house for a couple of weeks to make sure they dry out before extracting the actual seeds. Choose a cool dry spot out of direct sunlight.

4) Next, remove the seeds being careful not to damage them, and discard any debris. At this point I leave them to dry some more (a week or two) then store in a labeled airtight container. If I have a small number of seeds of different types I put them into labeled envelopes then put these into a jar with a lid.

Calendula flower seeds from a dried seed head.

It's a good practice to get in the habit of labeling your seeds with basic information that will be very helpful later such as: the exact name of the variety, where you got the parent plant or original seeds, and the year of collection. You'll be amazed at how fast your collection will grow, and you'll enjoy sharing them.

There are good reasons for saving the seeds of your favorite food plants besides just the fun of it: perhaps you have a special heirloom variety that is in limited supply, or one given to you by a neighbor. Saving the seeds allows you to expand the number of plants for next year’s planting season, or to share them with others for years to come.

You might even create a new variety or cultivar from natural crossbreeding in your garden!

But most importantly, you will be a a part of a growing movement to save our agricultural biodiversity, all from your own home garden.

Edible Landscaping in Silicon Valley: Reviving the Valley of Heart's Delight

Technology companies, sprawl and suburbia may have replaced the fields of prune, apricot, cherry and walnut tree orchards that once graced what is now my neighborhood, but local food production is beginning to slowly return to our region. 


Silicon Valley may again one day be referred to as the "Valley of Heart’s Delight”, its former nickname from back when the area's local landscape was dominated by rich, diverse food production and stunning natural beauty.

(To learn more about gardening with edibles see my Gardening Index page, and my Recipe Index page)

 

Edible Landscaping by Example

Last weekend Common Ground's 5th Annual Edible Landscaping Tour featured 10 beautiful and creative home gardens from Menlo Park to Mountain View on the SF Peninsula, all with an emphasis on organically grown vegetables and fruit. 


This popular event continues to attract a growing number of eager attendees ready to learn how to transform their suburban gardens and grow their own food.

Chez TJ's Chef Joey Elenterio and Louise Christy, Master Gardener

Read the full post

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

Gardeners Help End Hunger in Their Communities

 It's planting time - this season plant a little extra to donate to your local food bank. In my city of Mountain View, CA go to the Community Services Agency with your home grown fresh produce, including herbs. You'll make a lot of people happy and healthy!

Growing food is a fundamental human activity and part of our social legacy that leads naturally  to sharing the abundance with our neighbors. Planting extra edibles and donating the surplus for those in need is not only a simple way for gardeners to contribute to alleviating hunger, but it's also a way to feel a real connection to your community.

If you have any space at all to grow vegetables or fruit, you can have a significant impact on not only reducing hunger, but also on promoting better nutrition. Fresh fruits and vegetables are expensive when you are struggling to make ends meet and feed your family, but they are essential for better health and proper nutrition. All that is required is that you grow a little extra and donate what you don't need to your local food bank.

As our economy continues to flounder, and the number of people who go hungry increases each day, local produce grown from your backyard garden can make a big difference in the lives of others. Food banks, public service agencies, and charities are reaching out to the public to get donations of fresh produce to distribute to the hungry, and the home gardener plays a key role. In addition to suburban gardens, community and school gardens and even company gardens can make produce donation a special part of their gardening programs.

How to Share Your Harvest

Programs such as "Plant a Row for the Hungry", started by the Garden Writers Association (GWA) as a public service project, highlight that there are over 84 million households in the USA that have yards or gardens, and if each of them planted just one extra row of vegetables and donated the produce to their local food bank or other service agency, significant progress would be made towards reducing hunger.

The GWA provides guidance and support on how start a program at the local level. There are now numerous local Plant a Row for the Hungry projects throughout the country, and to date over 14 million pounds of produce has been donated by gardeners. 

At the Community Services Agency (CSA) in Mountain View California, on average over 200 people a day shop at the agency’s Food and Nutrition Center for food to supplement what they and their families have to eat. The most popular items are fresh fruit and vegetables, and often there are not enough of these to distribute. Even donations of fresh herbs are welcome, and most gardeners have an abundance of prolific herbs (oregano, thyme, mint, basil, etc.).

We recently brought a big box of Meyer lemons from our large tree and bundles of freshly cut organic herbs to the Community Services Agency in Silicon Valley. As we laid our donations out several people immediately began taking handfuls of fragrant herbs and seemed most delighted to have them. It was very obvious that fresh produce is very much in need and appreciated.

The Second Harvest Food Bank of Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties also  requests donations of produce, which they distribute to other food distribution agencies:

"By sharing fresh fruits and vegetables lovingly grown in the backyard, the community can help nourish their neighbors in need."

They have also partnered with Village Harvest, an organization of volunteers that will come to your house and harvest surplus fruit from your trees for donation to food banks.

 

Transforming Ecosystems and Local Communities

Gardeners not only have the power to  transform their local urban and suburban ecosystems into thriving habitats while growing food, we also have the power for transformative social good. Most gardeners would be happy to contribute their surplus garden produce to feed the hungry, but the challenge is raising awareness about this simple but critical act of caring for the poor that makes an enormous difference in the health and nutrition in our local communities.

Find your local food bank today and get the most out of growing your own food – share it with others!

This post was published on Ecolocalizer