Edible Landscaping
Your landscape can be beautiful, functional AND tasty. The possibilities for edible landscaping are endless. Food producing gardens are a wonderful way to diversify your property. Nothing tastes better than produce picked minutes before you eat or cook it. Examples of edible landscapes include edible vegetable gardens, herb gardens, and fruit trees, and heritage gardens. The design can be formal or informal as you wish. You can incorporate edible flowers with vegetables, explore the interesting ornamental features of vegetable varieties, and combine herb and vegetable container plants with garden beds. Many fruit trees and shrubs require both male and female parts to produce fruit, so you may need to have two or more plants, or there are trees (mostly apple) that have a couple of varieties grafted together to serve this purpose. All require full sun, well-drained soil and lots of compost. Check out your local garden centre or seed catalogue for new varieties.
Herb Gardens
Nothing beats fresh herbs in pasta, sauces, and teas. Herbs are also great because most are easily grown in pots, making these gardens well suited to even the smallest backyard or balcony.
Fruit Orchards
Whether it's two trees or ten, there's nothing like being able to pick fresh fruit right from the tree. And it doesn't have to be just trees - why not put up some trellises and grow your own grapes or plant raspberry or blackberry bushes in your yard?
Vegetable Gardens
Vegetables are easy to grow and usually small enough that even a small garden can grow many different types. Vegetable gardens are also a great way to get children interested in gardening (and excited about vegetables!).
Heritage Gardens
Over the last couple of decades, just a few varieties of fruits and vegetables have begun to dominate the produce market, with hundreds of traditional varieties and flavours at risk of being permanently lost as fewer and fewer farms grow them. These gardens preserve some of these varieties, keeping the variety alive (and edible!) for years to come. In many cases, the varieties of fruits and vegetables available in a heritage garden can no longer be bought in larger supermarkets, and so becomes a specialty at your own table. To learn more about starting a heritage garden, visit the Seeds of Diversity website.
On our Recommended Reading page, we have listed some of our favourite organic vegetable and herb gardening books. Most should be available at your local public library.
