Gardening & Landscaping
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Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Anyone do edible landscaping?
I'm thinking about taking out the monkey grass at the front of my house and replacing it with strawberries.
shadowboxerkd: "Old people are expensive and smell like mothballs."
Re: Anyone do edible landscaping?
My grandfather's philosophy was, "If it can't feed me, it ain't worth planting." I'm trying to get back to that. What I plant either needs to be something I love (bulbs), that I can eat, or that is in some other way useful (citronella, marigolds).
I needed a nice tree for one area, I planted a fig. My front flower bed has a row of azaleas in the back and a square foot garden in the front. I'm tried to stick with more decorative things in that garden - a row of cabbages, row of bright compact peppers, marigolds.
I have some arctic kiwis in pots that I'm hoping to transplant soon. We need to clear out some more things in the yard and find the right spot for them. They've done fine in the pots and I figured it'd give them time for their root system to develop.
For potted things for the patio, I have a blackberry bush and blueberry bush. They are young so I'm not expecting fruit until next year.
Right now, it's a mess. But I'm working on it. We have a long way to go with our house and yard.
Before I buy a plant, I ask what it can do for me - can it feed me? Keep pets away?
Interesting viewpoint. When I buy a plant, my primary concern is feeding pollinators. As I see it, it's the bottom of the food chain that needs the support, because I have many options for food and they don't. Bees and other pollinator insects are declining at an alarming rate.
Edible landscapes are great, but it's also important to use native versions of those plants whenever possible, to support the insects that we need.
Good points. Several of the gardening books I have talk about the need for plants to attract bees.
thus far I've mostly just incorporated herbs (and woody herbs at that), but I'm hoping to pull the trigger on some grape vines for the front yard instead of something like clematis.
I've got waaaaaayyy too many bunnies and chipmunks to put more herbaceous edibles unprotected.
We smothered our front lawn and put in raised beds. If I thought my neighbors cared I would add chard, lettuce and eggplant to the garden beds instead.
I swear eggplant has to be one of the prettiest flowers I've ever seen:
Compact growth too!
If you have the space and the sun, artichoke is also nice:
"The meek shall inherit the earth" isn't about children. It's about deer. We're all going to get messed the fuckup by a bunch of cloned super-deer.- samfish2bcrab
Sometimes I wonder if scientists have never seen a sci-fi movie before. "Oh yes, let's create a super species of deer. NOTHING COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG." I wonder if State Farm offers a Zombie Deer Attack policy. -CaliopeSpidrman
I decided to dabble in edible landscaping this year, but we're in a rental house so I can't do anything too drastic. I have a few bushes in the front flowerbeds, and I just planted some seeds for lettuce, spinach, radishes, carrots, and beets in between them. I'll still probably put in a few flowers too.
I figure that if I'm going to spend the time watering the beds out front, I might as well put something useful in them. It's better quality soil than my actual garden plot, plus now I have more room in the garden to plant other vegetables.