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Foodscaping Ideas to Put Your Yard to Work for You With Edible Landscaping

Foodscaping Ideas to Put Your Yard to Work for You With Edible Landscaping

Edible Landscaping is a Natural Thing

Gardening, foodscaping and edible landscaping is not only a recession-proof hobby and industry, it’s one that tends to thrive in harder times. If you’re in a subdivision that restricts gardening, we’ll cover that as well.

Covid-19 Pandemic Crisis Causes a Rise in Gardening

With the Covid-19 Pandemic crisis, many interest in home gardening has grown significantly.

While the lawn and ornamental plant industry struggled following the 2008 housing bubble meltdown, then as now, the food gardening segment grew and is still growing.

However, the most popular gardening is still flower gardening. If that’s you, you may enjoy our purple flowers article.

Flower gardening is the most popular gardening activity based on a 2021 garden survey by Axiom Marketing-GardensAll.com
AxiomMarketing.com 2021 Garden Survey – via GardensAll.com

Garden Seed Sales Are at a Historical High

W. Atlee Burpee & Co., the largest seed and gardening supply store in the country, says it has seen a 25 to 30 percent spike in vegetable seed and plant sales in the spring of 2020, compared with last.

In 2009 — following the 2008 housing and financial market crash — George Ball, Chairman and CEO of the W. Atlee Burpee & Company said, “I’ve been in the business for 30 years, and I’ve never seen anything like it—even remotely like it.”[1]https://www.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/04/01/recession.garden/

Well… now he has. In March, 2020 Burpee & Co sold more seed than any time in its 144-year history.[2]https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-gardens/home-gardening-blooms-around-the-world-during-coronavirus-lockdowns-idUSKBN2220D3

Even as the economy showed signs of recovery, interest in gardening did not decline. The first year of establishing a garden is your most expensive year. After that, if you plan right and harvest seeds from your crops your additional expenditures are greatly reduced.

In 2020, most seed companies were running out of seeds of all kinds, to the point where many closed their online shopping carts until further notice. Some closed due to a quarantine induced staffing shortage. Others closed due to high demand. However the majority ran out of most seeds

In 2021, while there are still many out of stocks (OOS) of items everywhere, the majority of seed companies (if not all) are back in business selling seeds.

If you’re a landscaper, consider adding a vegetable gardening service to your landscape gardening business. Landscapers who love vegetable gardening could also offers foodscaping, vegetable and herb gardening as a part of your services.

Many people would love to have their own vegetable and herb garden but simply don’t have the time.

Landscapers can grow their landscaping business by adding a vegetable gardening service.

You Can’t Eat the Grass.

But you can create an edible landscape design, called foodscaping.

So here’s the thing. As much as we may enjoy seeing a lovely lawn and feeling fresh grass beneath bare feet, a lawn is not sustainable. Lawns require work and produce nothing to sustain human life.

Sure, lawns are lovely, and definitely require less work than an edible garden. Lawns help keep weeds out and a yard looking neat (when mown). Lush green grass may feed our aesthetic sensibilities, but they don’t feed our families or nourish our bodies.

Worse… for lawns to look the best, often requires chemical fertilizers and weed control, none of which are good for the environment, pets, our bodies, or own yard and permaculture ecosystem.

Today, shrinking lawns and expanding gardens are a good thing. It may be time to put your yard to work for you instead of working so hard to keep it up.

But if you love your lawn, there’s still a way you can have the best of both worlds.

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Swapping Grass for Greens

Growing your own food is not only a great way to save money, it’s also a healthy activity. Gardening therapy is a known thing because the activity of gardening has so many benefits, including access to the freshest food on the planet if you’re growing food.

If you enjoy gardening, but have limited yard space, then like many gardeners, you’re likely always on the lookout for ways to grow more in less space and time, such as through vertical gardening. One of the best ways to begin replacing lawn with an edible garden is a little at a time.

Even if you’re under Homeowners Association restrictions (HOA), there are ways of foodscaping with attractive plants and edible flowers that also have ornamental appeal. You can gradually widen your landscaped patches and add favorite edible plants, shrubs and fruit trees.

Another great way to “hedge” the HOA is to plant edible hedges. Edible hedgerows can provide attractive and functional barriers and borders, including espalier apple trees and other fruits. We’re now espaliering our fuyu persimmon trees.

One of the best ways to begin replacing lawn with an edible garden is a little at a time.

foodscaping ideas-grow food instead of lawns-replace lawns with ornamental vegetables-GardensAll.com
Foodscaping Ideas –

Blueberries add Seasonal Beauty and Food to Landscapes

We love growing blueberries in landscape and in a small orchard. They’re beautiful bushes that add colorful and varied leaves, blossoms and fruit. No HOA would object to growing blueberries in your yard, plus the leaves can be dehydrated for beneficial tea

You can find information and lots more on blueberry benefits in this article on How to grow blueberries.

foodscaping-blueberry bush-edible landscaping-foodscaping-GardensAll.com
Foodscaping Ideas – blueberry bushes for edible landscaping – image by GardensAll.com
Side-by-side image of blueberry bush in landscape design and closeup of blueberries-pink and blue blueberries and leaves.

Urban Farms and Backyard Growers Can Profit From Their Yards

You can make money by growing food in your backyard and we’ve written more about that in this article on an urban farm and make money farming from home.  First, here we share a few tips to help you turn your “backyard garden into an urban farm.

Here’s more on best plants for beauty and food, especially beneficial if your only sunny growing space means you’ll have to create a front yard vegetable garden.

If you’re a landscaper, consider a gardening business that also offers foodscaping, vegetable and herb gardening as a part of your services.

From Mowing Grass to Growing Food

First, if you have more lawn than garden, it’s time to convert some of that turf into a garden patch or greenhouse. You can go from mowing grass to growing food.

Imagine walking out your door into a yard garden—and urban oasis—and a greenhouse of plants that’s producing food. Instead of stopping off at the store for fresh produce on your way home from work, you go straight home, stroll into your own yard garden and pluck fresh ripe produce. From yard to table, “farm to fork” locavore.

We love the idea of a geodesic dome greenhouse, so that’s on our wishlist.

Instead of spending precious time and money on your lawn… you’re saving money growing food that’s healthier and more delicious. How rewarding! You can also avoid spraying chemicals to get rid of weeds and make your grass greener.

In fact… before you kill them or get rid of them, you may want to check for those weeds you can eat that have edible and/or medicinal benefits such as these weeds with purple flowers.

Imagine… at day’s end, as you relax in your garden oasis enjoying a dinner of fresh vegetables plucked from your own backyard garden!

foodscaping ideas for creating an edible landscape in your yard-GardensAll.com
Imagine a stroll in your backyard “store” of food… your own edible garden, over mowable grass.

Gardens Improve Quality of Life

Consider the quality added to our lives in time saved and easier access to the healthiest, freshest food on the planet. You’ll spend less time cutting things down (grass), versus growing things (edibles).

It’s not so expensive or odd to have a garden and even a greenhouse in your backyard. In fact, it’s rather odd not to if we think about it. It’s an anomaly beginning with the second industrial era in the late 19th Century, then again around 75 years ago with the advent of the Contemporary period.

Since then, civilization has continued to move further away from our hunter gatherer and farming ancestral roots. Those ancestors were all more directly connected to growing, hunting and foraging for food and and medicine. In fact, in ages past it would be considered a huge folly not to have a garden patch of vegetables growing in your yard.

Gardening Provides and Empowers

A backyard garden just makes sense. Imagine a stroll in your backyard “store” of food… your own edible garden. Plucking fresh produce in peace and quiet instead of riding or pushing a noisy mower. Communing with nature in fresh air and sunshine for vitamin D.

Gardening means more harvesting and less pushing a shopping cart through aisles of highly processed packaged foods. Less need to pay high prices for organic produce, or else settle for chemically treated fruits and vegetables that have traveled many miles away from the source.

We love tropical fruits that don’t grow in our 7a USDA growing zone. So we not completely locavores, but we try supporting local businesses and growers whenever we can.

It’s time to implement landscaping ideas that put your yard to work for you. A wonderful side benefit is that the more time you spend in the garden, the happier and more optimistic you’ll become.

Now let’s move into garden details like effective watering strategies and garden planning.

Watering for Every Last Drop

We probably all grew up with sprinklers and gleefully ran through them as kids on hot summer days, in swim suits or short… barefoot and giggling. So, there’s a time and place for sprinklers, and hey, it’s a healthy activity of relatively cheap entertainment for kids, (unless you live in a water-restricted area).

If you have a small are to water then sprinklers are the simplest solution. For watering vegetable garden and foodscaping needs, you’ll want to look into some more efficient systems.

Most Efficient Garden Watering Methods

Water conservation is vital in some parts of the country, so when it comes to gardening, sprinklers are not the most efficient way to water your plants.

Drip Irrigation and Soaker Hoses

Many traditional irrigation methods waste a lot of water. When designing an irrigation plan for your lawn and garden, use drip irrigation or soaker hoses to conserve water.

Sprinklers

If you must use sprinklers, make sure they don’t shoot water too high, as wind can blow the water away from the yard where it belongs. So be sure to position them so no water is landing on sidewalks, the driveway or the street as much as possible.

When to Water Your Foodscape

Plan your watering, too. Watering in the middle of the day can cause you to lose a significant percentage to evaporation. Water in the early morning or evening, or set a timer to water at night, to allow the water enough time to soak in.

Kids love to help in the garden. Let them water the plants before they can play in the sprinkler!

Including children in gardening can create wonderful memories and habits for life!

Gardening with children creates wonderful  memories and habits for life!
Oh, and before you let the kids play in the sprinkler… have them water the plants. 😉

Plant for the Future

When planning your yard and garden landscape, plan with a long-term view of how the plant will grow. When planting trees and landscapes, it’s important to consider the plant or tree in all seasons. It’s also important to plan and plant for what the plant will look like in 20-30 years (for those perennials that last that long).

Factors to Consider When Planning Your Landscape Design

Here are general ideas for creating a landscape plan. Once you get the basics of this, you can come back again and pepper in your edibles.

  1. Theme of your landscape area by appearance and/or type, such as gardens for:
    • Herbs
    • Butterflies
    • Fairies
    • Xeriscaping
  2. Appearance in relation to other plants and including:
    • Seasonal Characteristics – appearance and functional attributes for each season
    • Color – does it complement your other plants
    • Shape – vary the shape and size in a way that’s pleasingly compatible, such as smaller to larger, different shapes or sections of similar shapes
    • Size
  3. Size – how big will it grow, including:
    • Will it shade out other plants?
    • Are roots known to spread and compromise home foundations? (Fig trees are notorious for that)
    • Will it grow so big as to hug your wall?
    • Select one larger feature plant per section, or, create a background of taller plants
  4. Sun/shade needs – including:
    • What side of the house is it between north, south, east, & west
    • Are there big trees there that will shade it in summer?

What Are the Seasonal Characteristics of the Tree of Shrub?

Will It Provide Shade?

If you choose deciduous trees, like peaches, pears and figs they will shed their leaves when the weather gets cold, ensuring that sunlight can get in and help to warm the house in the winter with passive solar.

Fruit trees are a great addition to foodscaping gardens, especially dwarf fruit trees for yards. Consider if they’re suited for adding shade to an area of your home or yard.

Trees around your home can reduce your summer air conditioning bill by providing more cooling shade and greenery. Then in winter, the deciduous trees shed leaves, clearing more room for solar warmth to shine through.

Does it Have an Interesting Shape of Color for Winter Landscapes?

Foodscaping-fruit and nut trees that will bear fruit for many years to come.

Consider Growth and Shedding when Planting Trees

The advantage of trees near your home are many, but there are liabilities to consider. Just be sure to plant them far enough away from the house that you don’t end up with fallen fruit rotting on your roof, gutters and under your windows.

Also, never plant fig trees near the foundation of your home or shed as the fig tree roots can grow so big and strong as to destroy your foundation. Nut trees are a great yard addition too, but again, plant them where they’re not shedding nuts onto your home or outdoor living space.

Don’t Let Your Trees Steal from Your Plants

Of course it’s best not to plant trees too close to the garden or other plants. Not only will they block the light but they provide ready access to your garden for squirrels.

Something we’ve learned the heard way is that having trees—or a tree—growing too close to the garden may strengthen the tree at the expense of your edibles. Not only will the tree block some of the sun your garden need, they will also steel valuable garden nutrients from your foodscaping. They send their roots in that direction and leech nutrients intended for garden plants.

Trees can steal light and nutrients from your garden plants, so be sure to account for mature tree height and breadth.

Future Growth

In general, when it comes to any kind of garden design and edible landscaping, it’s best to draw up a plan that takes into account future growth, and plan accordingly. We really like the garden planner app we use.

This app takes into account companion planting, other landscape areas, growth size for space needed and is super easy to update. Once you add your garden dimensions you can use, adjust and update that same template season after season.

It also takes into account seasonal gardening for crop rotation, and provides color visual schematics of your garden plan that are easily altered and saved.

Our guiding mantra that helps in deciding whether to invest in a plant or seeds is to ask: “Is it edible?”

FOODSCAPING: When planting anything, consider edibles first.

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Garden Friends – Companion Plants

Companion planting is a great way to keep your food garden healthy and productive. Knowing which plants support each other and which may harm each other in a garden can make all the difference.

It’s interesting how some plants—like people—get along better than others. Some don’t get along and others are just meant to be together. So definitely consider companion planting for the greatest efficiency of space and production.

For example, did you know that, it’s best not to plant tomatoes, potatoes and eggplant near each other? Being members of the same family, they are susceptible to the same diseases, so planting them close to each other increases the risk of all of them suffering.

It’s interesting how some plants—like people—get along better than others. Some don’t get along and others are just meant to be together. So definitely consider companion planting for the greatest efficiency of space and production.

Multi-talented Beneficial Garden Plants

There are delightful edible flowers and culinary herbs that play well with most crops. Some also have medicinal benefits such as best herbs for cold and flu and other plants like these natural antifungal herbs.

While you may enjoy having a dedicated herb garden for appearances as well as convenience, go ahead and plant one or more of these plants in and amongst you larger garden plants as well. Herbs as well as lettuces are good plants to sprinkle about in bare dirt areas.

Planting herbs and flowering plants like these around your tomatoes can help thwart invasion by aphids, nematodes and tomato hornworms. Marigolds near your lettuce or cabbage crops helps keep slugs and snails away.

Find more on How to Get Rid of Garden Slugs Naturally here.

Planting nightshade plants together increases the risk of disease. Space them out amongst other plants.

Beans Fertilize and Restore the Soil

Growing beans near corn promotes healthy, abundant crops without needing additional fertilizer. See an easy to make bamboo bean teepee trellis for an attractive foodscaping idea to help make your bean plants a more attractive feature.

Edible Flowering Plants

Nasturtiums are a perennial floral plant that helps keep all kinds of harmful bugs away. Every part of the nasturtium plant, from roots to flowers, is edible, so you could say that nasturtiums are a perennial vegetable. We love to eat a nasturtium or two whenever we go to the garden, as well as place them in salads.

Word of caution: You may not want to eat nasturtium blossoms straight from the garden. Tiny ants are prone to live deep inside the blossoms and be completely invisible until you take the blossom apart. That’s what we do if eating the blossoms while in the garden. But, you can also eat the leaves, which taste just as good and are far less likely to have any hitchhikers.

We bring the blossoms inside and soak them in a bowl of cool or cold water first. This serves to separate any ants from their hideout while keeping the flowers fresh until you place them on your salad. You can munch on the leaves in the garden though. Both the nasturtium leaves and blossoms have a pleasant peppery flavor.

Edible flowers are a great addition to any yard garden and are great for foodscaping. With edible flowers you have food, beauty and often medicinal benefit, such as with calendula, rosemary and borage.

Attractive Herbs and Edible Flowers as Allies Against Pests

There are many edible flowers, and they’re all beautiful. So consider which are your favorites amongst the many edible flowers.

You can make any meal or salad look exotic instantly by adding an edible flower or two!

Grow Food Not Lawns

Rolling green lawns look great. If you want to keep your lawn, then of course, keep it. However, if you’d like to grow more edible plants that feed you, consider trading in some lawn for edible landscape plants. If you’re not sure if you want to get into full-on vegetable gardening, foodscaping with edible landscape plants is a great way to ease into it. Chances are you be hooked

Grass is a major water-hog and can easily invade your food growing space easily. If you really want a patch of lawn, keep it as small as you can, and make your vegetable and flower beds as large as you can. For play space, look at other options, like low growing ground covers.

Helpful Small Lawn Equipment

With just a small lawn, for dogs and kids and barefoot delight, you can easily clip the grassy patch with the old-timey non-motorized reel mowers that are making a comeback. They’re quiet, require no fuel and are relatively inexpensive. 

Or, if you want to go fancier, there’s this cute little motorized mower by Greenworks. We have a Greenworks leaf blower and Husqvarna comparisonr, and also their Greenworks Brushless Cordless Pole Saw and are pleased with both. As with many brands, their batteries are proprietary, so best to decide on your preferred brand where the batteries are interchangeable before investing in power tools.

Okay, back to plants.

Edible and Medicinal Ground Covers

Better yet, how about medicinal and edible ground covers? There are numerous options. We’re favoring those with culinary, medicinal and repellent properties such as Creeping Thyme, Creeping Rosemary, and Oregano for full sun herbal ground covers. Wintergreen and mints work well for low sun or shade.

Wintergreen berries and leaves are edible, and all mints aid in pest control.

Creeping Thyme is an edible, medicinal herb helpful in repelling mosquitos, contains oils that are antiseptic, antiviral, antifungal antibiotic, detoxifying and more.

Plants to Repel Fleas and Ticks

Another advantage of growing mint and rosemary as ground cover is they tend to repel fleas and ticks, so if you have pets, that’s a perfect choice. Thyme is also a natural mosquito repellent, yet attracts butterflies and pollinators.

Thyme attracts what you want and repels what you don’t, plus it’s edible and medicinal! Hmm… should probably be planted with a cape! 🦸🏻‍♂️ 🦸🏻‍♀️

Creeping Rosemary is an edible and medicinal ground cover that repels, mosquitos, flies, fleas and ticks!

Rosemary is a perennial herb with woody, evergreen needles and has an incredible fragrance. The blooms can be purple, white, blue, or pink. While not minty in flavor, it's a member of the mint family. #PurpleFlowers #Landscaping #Flowers #Rosemary #Growing #EdibleGarden #GardenIdeas

If You Have Pets

Of course if you have pets, while you’ll want to plant these flea and tick repelling ground covers, be careful if you plant to use them for human consumption. Or, you can grow them in planters, raised beds or fenced in pet-free (and pet pee free) areas!

Taking some time to plan your food garden properly and do a bit of research will make all the difference between a handful of tomatoes and bushels full of abundant produce. If you can add in a greenhouse, you can even grow food year round!

Imagine how much money you’ll save in not having to buy as much of the store bought goods that are less fresh, less tasty and less nutritious overall! 

Time to take that yard off “welfare” and put ‘er to work, aye?!?

Here’s to abundant gardens, edible landscapes and beautiful foodscapes!

One of the best ways to begin replacing lawn with an edible garden is a little at a time, such as by widening your landscaped patches and adding in your favorite edible plants, shrubs and fruit trees. #PurpleFlowers #Landscaping #Flowers #Rosemary #Growing #EdibleGarden #GardenIdeas

For More on Ornamental Edible Landscape Plants for Foodscaping Your Yard

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