Vegetables, Fruits & Herbs to Enhance the Garden
A large vegetable garden is a wonderful thing but not necessary to have an abundant harvest. With water rationing on the horizon, it’s time to re-think your landscape design!
Consider vegetables as elements of the landscape when developing the design. Think about color, texture, size and every other aspect of the vegetable just as if it were a typical beautiful landscape plant. With this technique, vegetables and herbs easily become mainstays of a beautiful landscape.
Ideas for your edible landscape
Peppers and greenery work well in a container.
From top, Swiss chard, cardoon with its deeply dissected foliage, ‘Red Giant’ mustard; and pink larkspur and kale.
Some examples of vegetables and herbs that easily fold into home landscapes are dill, parsley, basil, lettuce, chard, kale, carrots, bulb fennel and beets. Each has its own landscape characteristics and value.
Dill with its tall majestic feathery stance, can serve well as a thickly planted background feature that holds the shorter features together.
Parsley and pansies can be mixed in as a ground cover feature.
Red Nasturtiums and Chard. Nasturtiums, pansies and violas, all edible flowers, can be part of your edible landscape. The flowers of these plants, and even the leaves of nasturtiums can be mixed into salads.
Swiss chard, with its red, yellow, pink and white stems mixed with crinkly 2′ tall leaves makes an outstanding mid level feature, and is often seen in neighborhood median street plantings as the feature plant.
Tags: design, edible, flowers, vegetables
