Favorites for Edible Landscaping

by | Mar 16, 2020

 

In suburbia, especially, we grow mostly lawn grass. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Here are some suggestions for a beautiful and edible landscape around your home:

  • Blueberry Bushes: Nicely shaped shrubs with delicious berries in summer and lovely autumn color. Consider these if you have acidic soil.
  • Espaliered fruit trees: With careful (but not complicated) pruning, you can have a living screen or fence that also gives you apples or nectarines. These space-saving trees can give as much fruit as a traditional fruit tree.
  • Black raspberries: Not to be confused with blackberries, black raspberries are dark like blackberries but have the shape and texture of raspberries. They have a deep, rich raspberry flavor and are my favorite summer fruit for jam. They are also tolerant of shade, unlike many other edible plants.
  • Strawberries: Strawberries of all types make a great ground cover plant. June-bearing strawberries won’t stay where you put them over the years (they send out runners and like to “travel” around a garden), but everbearing types will stay put. Tiny and intensely sweet, alpine strawberries make beautiful edging plants and also work well in containers.
  • Herbs: Herbs are beautiful, fragrant, and delicious. DO NOT plant mint in the ground because it will take over. Save that one for containers. In my garden at Maplehurst, chives have beautiful pink flowers in early summer, and sage is a vigorous, perennial herb that spreads itself around. In warmer climates, rosemary can grow to shrub-like proportions.
  • Elderberry: These grow wild in my part of Pennsylvania, but they also make a beautiful, spreading shrub around my home. Do some research in order to choose an edible variety and then make your own fizzy elderflower “champagne” or immune-boosting elderberry syrup.
  • Asparagus: Planted in the right place, this long-lasting perennial would make a beautiful feathery-green privacy screen.
  • Lettuces and other greens: These are beautiful edible plants in a rich array of colors. Choose “cut and come again” varieties of lettuce or greens like kale and colorful Swiss Chard in order to harvest without leaving bare patches in your landscape.

One last note: with edible landscaping it is especially important to consider your soil. If you live in an urban area and / or have an old home, you must assume that the ground could have high levels of lead. Containers or deep raised beds are good solutions.

Weed Control Meets Recycling

by | Mar 13, 2020

Weeds.

Just the word fills us with horror, doesn’t it?

One of my favorite methods of weed control is … drumroll, please! … ordinary, humble cardboard.

That’s right, the familiar brown corrugated cardboard that fills our lives–and our recycling bins–is an excellent resource for weed control. I use it in areas that are difficult to weed, for instance, underneath my thorny roses.

First, I choose plain brown (not glossy, or inky) cardboard. I flatten it out, taking time to remove any plastic packing tape. Then I lay a single layer in those spots where weeds like to grow (but are difficult to pull). Finish it off with a layer of compost or mulch.

The cardboard will slowly decompose, but it will smother weeds as it does. The cardboard could keep some water from your plant’s thirsty roots, but as long as there is enough water–and you take some care with your watering–it shouldn’t be a problem. Weeds are thirsty, too, so it isn’t a bad trade-off.

Native Trees

by | Mar 12, 2020

 

When we think of native plants, our minds often turn toward those flowers beloved by butterflies.

But have you considered planting a tree native to your area?

Where I live, white oaks are an especially important (and majestic) tree, but they struggle to survive marauding deer. They can also be difficult to transplant because of their long taproot. Planting an acorn or carefully moving a seedling when it pops up in a flower bed are great options. More and more tree growers are learning how to offer white oaks for transplanting, and I love to shop for trees at Bower&Branch.

Every area is different, but taking the time to ask around and observe the wilder parts of your local area can tell you a lot about the trees native to you.

Of course, there is a lot of debate about what makes a native a native. If a tree is native to mountains a few hundred miles from your non-mountain home, can it really be considered native for you? Perhaps the answer is properly no, but don’t let that stop you or discourage you. Planting trees is almost without exception a great idea, and while it’s worth doing the research to choose the right tree for the right spot, trees can offer so much to us no matter if they are growing miles from their natural habitat.

Here are some native trees (loosely defined!) that I love growing at Maplehurst:

 

  • White Fringetree (chionanthus virginicus): A small, multi-stemmed tree with beautiful, scented white feathery blossoms in spring
  • Carolina Silverbell (Halesia carolina): An elegant, medium-sized tree with spring blossoms just like delicate “silver bells”
  • Eastern Red Cedar (juniperus virginiana): Not a true cedar, females of this evergreen have lovely pale-blue fruits
  • Northern Red Oak (quercus rubra): Like the white oak, this is an excellent tree to shelter and feed wildlife

Self-seeding Flowers

by | Mar 11, 2020

Some annual flowers behave almost like perennials because the seeds they drop at the end of the growing season germinate and grow the following year. It’s always a fun surprise to wait and see where they will pop up next, and you can manage the process a bit by shaking their seeds in those areas where you want to see them grow.

I love to include self-seeders in my garden, though I recommend asking around to make sure that you aren’t introducing something that might be invasive in your local area.

Here are my favorite self-seeding flowers:

  • Verbena bonariensis: A beautiful, airy pinkish-purple flower that grows on tall stalks. Butterflies love it.
  • ‘Dara’ laceflower: Actually, a form of carrot, this is like Queen Anne’s Lace but in beautiful pink and chocolate-brown colors.
  • Viola: I love the old-fashioned viola commonly known as ‘Johnny-Jump-Up.’
  • Cosmos: The return of these flowers is very hit-or-miss for me, but when they come back, I am always glad to welcome them.
  • ‘Lauren’s Grape’ Poppy (papaver somniferum): A beautiful, purple poppy. Even the seedheads are gorgeous in the garden.

Choosing Edibles When Space Is Limited

by | Mar 10, 2020


Of course, in some sense, space is always limited, whether you measure your garden in number of pots or number of acres. We all have choices to make about how we will allocate our growing space.

For those in need of edible plant ideas for their containers, I recommend edible flowers like dwarf nasturtiums and tiny, always-fruiting strawberries like the alpine strawberry ‘Mignonette.’ That one is easy to grow in window boxes or as a ground cover in a larger garden.

But what every gardener needs is a value system that helps them make the hard choices about what to grow year after year.

At Maplehurst, I’ve learned over time which edible crops hit the bullseye of delicious, easy to grow, and either expensive or impossible-to-find in the supermarket. Here are those that make my list year after year:

 

  • Fingerling potatoes: Easy, prolific, and absolutely delicious. Fingerlings can be expensive, but fill a single raised bed with them, and you will almost take them for granted for a month or more each summer. I love growing the ‘La Ratte’ variety from Seed Savers.
  • Ground Cherries: Sweet cherry-like fruits that you can grow from seed in one season? Yes, please! Ground cherries grow in a papery husk and taste like a cross between a cherry, a tomato, and a pineapple. They make the most beautiful and delicious jam. I grow them in a raised bed covered in black plastic, which makes the papery husks much easier to collect when they fall off, ripe, from the plant. ‘Aunt Molly’s’ is a great variety.
  • Leeks: There’s nothing like potato leek soup, but leeks can get pricy at the store.
  • Asparagus: If you have a spot for it, a perennial food crop like asparagus is well worth planting. The plants are long-lasting, and the flavor of fresh-picked can’t be beat.
  • Japanese sweet potatoes: I was introduced to these nutty-tasting sweet potatoes with white flesh by a friend who lived in Japan for many years. They are more nutritious than plain white potatoes, but the pale color fools my kids into eating them. I like ‘Murasaki.’
  • Thornless blackberries: Easy to grow, easy to harvest, and delicious straight from the canes or baked into a cobbler. We grow ‘Chester Thornless.’

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