No longer are homeowners content with plants that simply look pretty. The most pervasive trend in gardening is to eat what you sow.
“It’s all about mow less, grow more,” says Laura MacDonald, greenhouse manager for Brown’s Orchards and Farm Markets in York County, who advocates trading your flowers for fruits, herbs and vegetables.
“You can make over your front yard into an edible landscape that will feed you all season and give you enough to freeze to enjoy all winter,” says MacDonald.
Produce gardens have evolved from bland, mechanical rows relegated to a hidden corner of your yard. Now beauty and function can coexist with kitchen garden design that encourages, even celebrates, the myriad colors and textures of edible plants.
“Corn can be so pretty with the beautiful silks; just plant them as tall landscape plants, not in farm rows,” says MacDonald. “Or think of the unusual shape of Brussels sprouts or the color and texture of hot peppers. Especially if you live in a newer development with cookie-cutter houses, adding these in can make your garden look so unique.”
Try trading your clematis for the lush color and flavor of scarlet runner beans scampering up a trellis. Replace hostas with the leafy textures of lettuce and cabbages. Make your edging plants herbs like curly parsley and chives, or even edible flowers like nasturtiums and calendula that will reward you with lovely garden displays as well as add zip to your culinary dishes.
Or take a cue from Benjamin Weiss and embrace the adage to “eat your lawn” even more literally, turning a swath of grass into a green carpet of culinary herbs.
The certified permaculture designer, who is part of the Susquehanna Permaculture guild, has recently created the illusion of a lawn with edibles like mints, oregano, and sorrel for a Lancaster city client. If a dandelion shows up, it’s a reason to celebrate and make salad.
“We planted stuff that can handle our winters and be mowed,” says Weiss. “The idea was that grass is such an aggressive spreader, so rather than just downsizing the lawn which still means battling grass that gets into the garden, that we replace the lawn completely.”
The French term for these practical and pretty plantings is "potager," a smaller version of the famous elaborate decorative vegetable designs at Villandry in northern France. (A closer example is in Wilmington, Delaware, where the patriarch of the du Pont family constructed a potager at his Hagley estate.)
American colonial gardens boasted plenty of these kitchen gardens, often in raised beds filled with all sorts of vegetables as well as medicinal herbs. Landis Valley Farm Museum recreates these kitchen gardens. But once commercial vegetable production made having your own patch unnecessary, garden space became devoted to decorative flower plantings or simply turned to a monotony of green lawn.
The most pervasive trend in gardening is to eat what you sow
Now a renewed interest in flavorful, organic produce, coupled with the resurgence in entertaining at home with simple, casual ingredients, kitchen gardens are enjoying a renaissance and are taking center stage.
And it’s no wonder. Planting a kitchen garden allows you to step right outside the door with scissors or salad bowl in hand and pick essential ingredients for your favorite recipes.
Need a snip of basil for your pasta sauce? Want to decorate your salad with bright orange and yellow calendula petals? Looking to savor the unique flavor of zucchini blossoms? Like sprinkling fresh berries on your cereal? It’s all here, ripe and ready for picking. And by planting cold crops now, your harvest can continue through the winter.
“A lot of people don’t realize that with our relatively mild winters, we have a year-long growing season for vegetables,” says Weiss.
Now, at midsummer, Weiss says it’s time to plan for the fall and winter growing seasons.
“In mid-July you can be planting things like kale, collard greens, broccoli, salad greens, Asian greens, carrots, radishes, turnips and parsley,” he says.
MacDonald says Brown’s sells these annuals through the summer and fall to allow for succession plantings for a continual harvest.
MacDonald says the key to designing a kitchen garden that is both productive and aesthetically pleasing is to employ the same design skills that are employed in creating ornamental beds.
You’ll need to create varied plant heights, design focal points, and mix textures and colors.
“You can trellis beans and encourage tomatoes to climb up poles to add height,” she says. “And don’t forget to plant companion plants like basil around the base of tomatoes to attract beneficials and control pests.”
And also like an ornamental bed, you’ll need to pay extra attention to ensure your kitchen garden gets enough sunlight, has adequate soil fertility, and is protected from scavengers that might want to make off with tasty young plants.
In his designs, Weiss is a fan of edible landscaping that “mimics a forest” with numerous tiers—persimmon trees as the canopy, shorter apple trees as a framework, shrubs like currents and gooseberries and hedges like raspberries and blackberries to provide the middle height, trellised vines like hardy kiwi to give structural interest, and borders of alpine strawberries lining the paths and containing the planting beds.
“When you plant vertically, you can pack a huge amount of food-producing plants in a small area,” says Weiss. “Especially in city settings, this is what I’m keen on designing.”
In addition to his private clients, Weiss is also beginning two public production gardens in Lancaster city, one at the former armory, now the Stahr Performing Arts Center in the 400 block of North Queen Street, and the second a forest garden near Chesapeake Street along the Conestoga Greenway.
When creating this layered approach at your own home, make sure you don’t shade your growing vegetables. Site plots of corn and other tall crops toward the north end of your garden, placing the shortest crops to the south. Also remember that perennial crops like asparagus and rhubarb will produce in the same location for several decades, so make sure to site them well.
“In our designs, we like to use as many perennials as possible,” says Weiss.
When planning your garden you may also want to look for more decorative cultivars of plants you plan to consume, like ruby red chard, yellow bush beans and purple sage. Allow the color, shape and texture of the plant’s foliage drive your design. Feel free to scatter flower and herb seeds among root crops, mixing bright poppies with the foliage of onion sets, for instance, or contrasting the feathery foliage of dill with sturdy leek tops.
Flowers and herbs attract pollinators, and many repel garden pests. Plus, having a steady supply of flowers to adorn your supper table is part of the attraction of kitchen gardening.
When harvesting, also consider the design, picking in a pattern that renders the beds continually attractive. Allowing some crops to flower and bolt can also lend an interesting design element, like rhubarb flowers or the spiky cones of mature lettuce. Edging plants like edible flowers, herbs or berries keeps the beds interesting even after the interiors have been picked bare.
Container plants can also add variety to the design, whether you set out pots of invasive mint or grow acid-loving blueberries among your limestone-loving plants.
Container gardening also allows apartment dwellers or those with limited mobility the same pleasures of kitchen gardening on a smaller scale. Lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, many herbs, and even properly trellised zucchini, snap beans and cucumbers can thrive in containers if watered often. And strawberry pots are designed to provide handfuls of sweet berries for even the most severely space-challenged.
When planning the garden, also think about what your family will eat, if you plan to eat fresh or grow extra for preserving, and think about how much room and time you have to devote to your garden. Plant what you use often. And plant what you can’t find, or what is too expensive at the grocery store or at roadside markets.
A compost pile is an important element in a kitchen garden. It’s a place to recycle all the inedible parts of your harvest into food that will feed next year’s crop.
For those inspired to plant their own, there are numerous books available featuring kitchen garden designs and suggesting plant combinations and cultures, some dating to hundreds of years ago. These are filled with examples of striking kitchen garden designs from around the world and offer inspiration to experienced gardeners. But for those just starting out, a more helpful primer would be “Square Foot Gardening” by Mel Bartholomew, which details systems of intensive food production in the tiniest spaces, allowing the new gardener to begin with success.
What’s grown and how you design it is all a matter of preference, but the hallmark of a good kitchen garden is that it is as functional as it is beautiful.
“As long as you’re taking the time and energy and expense to plant something, it should be edible or medicinal or useful in some way,” says Weiss.