Rising Food Costs, in concert with a desire for the best
Either or both, rising food costs and/or your desire for the highest quality food for you and your family are VERY GOOD reasons to have an edible landscape.
Most residential neighborhoods look, basically, the same. A few shade trees, green lawn and foundation shrubs around your house.
You could have the same attractiveness while adding some extreme practicality and very high value to you and your family with an “edible landscape.”
Fruit trees do not require much more maintennce than ornamental trees and they bloom just as beautifully! So, plant fruit trees instead of ornamental ones!
Producing your own fruit, eliminates the necssity to ship it to your retailer from far away. And the best part is: you can harvest YOUR fruit at its peak of flavor because it doesn’t have to travel 1,500 miles before it reaches your local store.
If you and your family like salads, tomatoes, peas, potatoes, lettuce, spinich, chard, okra, eggplant–what have you; it’s easy to incorporate all of those into your landscape without having the traditional square plot with ugly stakes, strings, things to climb on, etc. Use just a little imagination. Keep in mind the light requirements. Most vegetabes require at least, 6 hours of sun per day. More is generally better.
Of course, if you have the space, there’s no reason you can’t grow for the entire year. There are many ways to do this:
1. Grow enough during season and preserve via freezing or canning.
2. Use season extenders (a later topic) or
3. Build a greenhouse where you can grow your own year-round.
For most things, I prefer to grow and preserve. But for things you want always fresh such as salad greens, etc. a greenhouse, season extender or hot bed will do the trick.
If you live in an apartment or condo, there’s always container gardening. I will write future articles about this but it is really a very viable way to produce much of your own home-grown.