Have Your Garden & Eat it Too

This article appears in the Spring 2010 issue of Gardennotes, the quarterly newsletter of the Northwest Horticultural Society.
by Lorene Edwards Forkner

With today’s media coverage, celebrity buzz, and prevailing economic uncertainty, you’d think the notion of growing our own food was recently invented. Here’s a little historical perspective: In the beginning all gardens were vegetable gardens; everything else was nature!

As history is wont to do, we can see it repeating itself. Medieval walled gardens provided both food and medicine; showy, formal potagers of the Renaissance were indicators of great wealth; World War II era Victory gardens had an economic incentive, while much of our current return to the vegetable garden is based on a 21st century awareness of food security, health, and nutrition. Gardeners have been feeding themselves for some time.

We’re all trying to live a little more lightly on this planet. Newly aware of threatened pollinators, human rights abuses, and the miles clocked on factory food, we’re taking ownership of our dinner plates and looking to be a part of a more sustainable, healthy food network. No longer simply a matter of aesthetics and décor, garden-making today is associated with good health and building community. And, by the way, the eating is delicious.

In the collective rush to produce homegrown food you may have discovered how easy it is to let the vegetable garden turn our landscapes into something loosely resembling an earnest farmstead, somewhat at odds with our more refined plantings.

Here are my tips for how to marry good design with digestibles, sound horticulture, and an abundant harvest.

Structure
Ornamental edible landscapes benefit from a degree of formality. The rough and tumble of riotous crops in high season can easily dissolve into an unstructured tangle in the absence of an underlying organization. Strong lines, raised beds, and pathways provide a constant framework to carry the design through seasonal shifts and accommodate gaps left by harvesting.

Formality and structure are not limited to hardscape elements when productive woody plants are worked into the mix.
Columnar apples and pears were a curiosity when they first appeared in nurseries but have proven to be incredibly productive and striking design elements.

Plants trained as cordons and espaliers, living fences, arbors, and tunnels are a venerable garden art form which provide formality, structure, and make efficient use of space in small city gardens.

Vertical interest
Most of the “action” in vegetable gardens takes place at ground level. Tepees, trellis supports, arches, and fences provide valuable height and scale. At the same time these architectural elements provide vertical growing space for beans, peas, squashes, and flowering vines. These add a decorative touch as well, satisfying those of us more accustomed to training clematis and sweet peas than cucumbers and snap peas.

Container plantings offer myriad opportunities to introduce height and scale as well as a distinctive style to your garden. The popular use of galvanized troughs looks both gleamingly modern as well as offering an agricultural nod to our efforts. Stone raised beds lend gravitas and elegant form throughout the year.

Color
Mother Nature by no means left color out of the edible garden. Select varieties in vibrant hues and place them in the same way that we use perennials and other ornamentals to create contrast and pleasing combinations. Plant both red and green lettuces for variety in the garden and on your plate; bell peppers come in a veritable rainbow of colors as do beans.

Take this concept one step further and integrate edibles within perennial compositions. During my nursery-owning years, I offered several varieties of showy, tender, ornamental Solanum. Large fuzzy leaves and shockingly orange or purple thorns made these plants the darling of garden designers and plant collectors alike who couldn’t get enough of their exotic, if somewhat painful, good looks. Last summer, looking to grow more heat-loving summer crops, I cast a new eye on my heretofore strictly perennial beds. I tucked Japanese eggplant starts (a Solanum family member) among flowering Salvia nemerosa ‘Caradonna’ and intensely blue Geranium pratense ‘Victor Reiter’. With the addition of a few small scale ornamental grasses this combination pleased me for months. My yield was a beautiful composition of texture, foliage, and nearly constant flowers which resulted in fantastic pollination and a bounty of ripe fruit for my table.

These days I’m on a mission to get gardeners to reframe how we look at, and what we consider, to be an ornamental garden. Incorporating fruits, vegetables, and herbs paints a pretty and delectable picture, but it also necessitates a shift in our expectations. If we simply stand back admiring our finished plantings and attempt to prolong their beautiful effect, our lettuce will go bitter and the birds will get our berries! Our goal must be to harvest, savor, and fully participate every day of the season.

Passionate gardeners, avid cooks, enthusiastic eaters—we’re all after the same thing. Good, clean, healthy food is as close as our own backyard and as beautiful as any prized perennial, tree, or shrub. This year, take the ornamental edibles challenge and see how many delicious and attractive crops you can tuck into your existing landscape. Just as in any garden, discovery and wonder, as well as the occasional disappointment and frustration, await us in a constantly revolving and delicious trip around the sun.

Swiss chard

More on edible landscaping
• Employ only organic controls in your “productive” landscape to maintain nutrition levels, soil health, and non-toxic conditions.
• Site crops to gain a full measure of necessary sun for maximum flavor, efficient growth, and the greatest production.
• Build healthy soil with compost, manures, and slow release organic fertilizers.
• Practice water-wise procedures; utilize mulches, and proper spacing to make the best use of this resource.
• Select seed varieties that you know to do well in our cool springs, moderate summers, and mild fall conditions.
• Purchase locally grown organic vegetable starts at independent nurseries, farmers’ markets, and plant sales.
• Plan and plant to avoid waste. When you have extras donate to your local food bank and share the bounty.