Landscaping with Fine Taste

March 31, 1997

If limits on your garden space or time challenge you to decide between your ornamental landscape and a vegetable garden, it may be time for you to look at both areas from a new perspective. One of the reasons I grow a vegetable garden is because the plants are so attractive. The crisp, bright green of new lettuce is a highlight in the spring. The rich, dark green of the summer tomato foliage sets off the red fruit that provides not only culinary rewards but also significant visual ones. The sunniest spot in the landscape that has been filled with a bed of marigolds and a patch of grass may be the handiest to the kitchen or right on the way from the car to the house. A great place for a garden, you've thought more than once, but who wants those straight rows in front of the house?

Create a new image of a garden, and integrate your fruits and vegetables into your flower beds to make the most attractive and productive use of your space. The concept of an edible landscape is not difficult to master, but it requires some relearning of how to design and care for both the ornamentals and the edibles.

Principles of Edible Landscaping

• Food crops give their best yield with 8 to 10 hours of full sun a day. If you must plant vegetables in partial shade, stick to fast-growing, cool-season crops, such as lettuce and spinach.

• Always use pesticides specifically labeled for food crops on or around any of your edibles. If you are spraying an ornamental plant in the same bed, it is too easy for drift or misdirected spray to contaminate your edibles.

• Plan for replacement plants as the season progresses and the spring vegetables are removed from the beds. You may rotate to other vegetables or to flowers for the remainder of the season, but an empty spot is more noticeable in a mixed planting than in a traditional garden plot.

• If you plan to include permanent edibles, such as fruit trees, be sure that their maintenance will be compatible with their location. Rotten apples dropping on the driveway is not a landscape asset.

• Start with just a few vegetable crops, and learn to integrate them into your landscape; then build a plan that gradually adds others in an effective, attractive, and easily maintained fashion.

More gardening information is available in the Virginia Gardener Newsletter.

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