How To Create An Edible Garden
Fresh fruit and vegetable prices are increasing almost daily! What can you do about it? I’ll tell you… you can grow as many you can in your own edible garden! A lot of people are already choosing to create more natural landscapes, even landscapes which contain plants that are useful, or can be eaten. Many vegetable plants are very attractive, and a lot of edible plants have ornamental varieties.
It certainly helped to halve my spending on fresh vegetables and I now have a beautiful edible garden instead of the traditional veggie patch. With a little planning, you too can grow a decorative extended vegetable garden that will repay you over and over again. Don’t let a lack of space stop you, they can be successfully grown in containers too.
Most people who create edible landscapes use perennial vegetables, because they come back year after year, without the need to replant them each year. The double bonus is that you’ll have a spectacular garden that also feeds your family!
A little watering and feeding is all most of them need, aside from the occasional weeding, pruning, or insect control. And because you’ve selected the types that regrow every season, you’ll enjoy your harvest year after year.
They’ll usually die during the winter, but every spring they’ll return and go through a growth cycle again. There are plenty of varieties of vegetables that you can plant that will keep feeding you year after year.
You can use many different types of edible plants to replace various aspects of traditional landscaping. You can use fruit trees in place of standard trees or if space is limited there are some wonderful dwarf fruit trees that produce abundant crops. Many perennial herbs can be used to replace ground covers and shrubs. And ornamental vegetables can be used in place of flowers, borders, or other accents.
Don’t be afraid to mix up your planting, you can have some wonderful combinations with a little imagination. Edible plants can look at home in a flower bed and many herbs will give your garden an individual appearance.
For something different, try planting a herb such as curly parsley amongst your lobelia, pansies, strawberries or dianthus. Also for really pretty low growing shrubs, sage, rosemary and oregano look sensational.
Leaf lettuces look lovely planted in beds as accent areas. You can plant a bed of different colors and varieties of leaf lettuce, and then edge it with a border grass. There are several types of plants that have edible flowers.
With all this talk about vegetables, don’t forget there are many plants with edible flowers or other edible parts, let’s look at some. Sugar snap peas have striking purple, white, or pink flowers as well as the delicious peas they produce. They can look sensational when they’re in full bloom.
Sage and salvias have delicate blue and purple flowers. Nasturtiums flower in orange, red and yellow and the blossoms are edible. Dill have gorgeous yellow colored blooms and fava beans produce white and red flowers. Then there’s the sensational purple globe-shaped flowers of the chive plant.
The maintenance required by these perennial herbs and vegetables is minimal, so they’re a good choice in your edible garden. Some of the choices you have are sweet potatoes, artichokes and Jerusalem artichokes, asparagus, dandelions, sorrel, broccoli, ginger, fennel, chives, rhubarb and garlic chives.
Tags: gardening, Vegetables