Edible Landscape Skills
Who says money doesn’t grow on trees? Homeowners expect their yards to cost them money. Few ever consider the possibility that instead of costing money, a yard actually can help save money.
The average yard in this country consumes money in three major ways. First, hundreds of dollars are wasted because few yards are planned to take advantage of solar heating or basic cooling techniques for the house. Second, yards that have large lawns, particularly in the arid West, where constant watering is necessary, often have high maintenance costs. And, finally, few yards are designed to cut food and gift-giving expenses.
Heating and cooling experts estimate that up to 20 percent of air-conditioning bills and 20 to 30 percent of heating bills for residences can be cut by proper placement of landscaping elements. The larger your yard, the more savings you can realize by strategically placing trees and shrubs. Well-placed evergreen shrubs and trees help cut down the effects of winter winds against the house; by removing evergreen shrubs and trees near the south-facing wall, the homeowner allows the winter sun to warm the wall. Conversely, in the summer, deciduous trees, shrubs, and vines can shade the south and west walls, preventing the heat from building up in the house.
Lawn, the Great Money Sink
I’ve seen it happen time and time again. People who are on a tight budget think they cannot afford to spend a lot of money on the landscaping; so they go to the nursery, buy a package of grass seed, and turn most of their yard into a large lawn. There are few things you can do, particularly in the West, that will cost you more over the long run. A lawn will nickel and dime you to death. Lawn mower, gas for the mower, lawn-mower maintenance, edger, water, sprinkler repairs, fertilizer, herbicides, fungicides, vacation maintenance: all for just a humdrum lawn. And a show-place lawn can cost you many hundreds of dollars a year. A well-maintained lawn needs to be aerated, thatched, reseeded, and top dressed every year. All of those expenses are just the tip of the iceberg. They don’t even take into account that the lawn area could be covered with money-saving plants that would provide food for the table.
Lawn maintenance is big money in this country, and our whole system is set up to perpetuate it. If you have a lawn, use appropriate lawn maintenance techniques to save money and use fewer resources. Here are a few pointers:
1. Plan your lawn area to be as level as possible so that water and nutrients won’t run off. Keep the lawn as small as possible. Don’t plant lawn simply because you don’t know what else to do.
2. Plan the area for ease of maintenance. Avoid spotting trees and shrubs in the lawn, and install mow strips (strips of concrete, brick, or wood that border a lawn and keep the wheels of the mower level at the edge, so when you mow, you also trim the edge), thereby cutting down on the amount of machine trimming. Furthermore, without trees the grass will grow thicker so that less weeding will be necessary.
3. No lawn grass species has low water or fertilizer needs, but some are a little better than others. Choose bluegrass and rye over bentgrass, which is a heavy feeder and needs lots of water.
4. Do not remove lawn clippings unless they are longer than an inch. Research has shown that turf is healthier and requires less fertilizer when the clippings are left in place. Grass clippings are equivalent to a 4-1-3 fertilizer, which means that two pounds of nitrogen per 1,000 square feet are saved on the average lawn. Contrary to popular opinion, thatch buildup is not a problem.
5. Avoid so-called cheap fertilizer. It ain’t! Nitrate fertilizers, in particular, are leached from the soil and volatilize into the air; plants get a quick fix of nitrogen, then soon need another shot. Except when the weather is cold, use organic manures or slow-release nitrogen fertilizers.
6. Mow the grass so it is 1-1½ to 2 inches long. Most people cut the grass too short, causing it to thin out. Grass that is cut too short requires more water.
Home-Grown Gifts
A delightful way to save money is to plan your garden with gift giving in mind. At Christmas or for birthdays, homemade strawberry or kiwi jam, pickles, canned peaches, tomato juice, applesauce, dried fruit for a trail mix, and dried herbs are always a hit. So are dried-flower bouquets, so in the summer grow statice, strawflowers, yarrow, baby’s breath, and many of the grasses with beautiful seed heads. Gifts from the yard are unusual and original.
If you occasionally buy flowers for the house, for a friend in the hospital, or if you enjoy taking a house gift when you go to a friend’s house for a visit, consider growing your own cut flowers. If you are short on garden time, plant perennials and shrubs that are easy to grow and that produce flowers you can cut. Another idea for people who are short on time (aren’t we all?) is to convert some of your lawn to a meadow and seed it heavily with wildflowers that are good for cutting. For winter giving consider growing and collecting some of the flowers and seed pods that dry well. Wreaths made of grapevines or wisteria can be dramatic when festooned with garlic heads and chilies for the kitchen, or with bittersweet and thistles for the front door.
Following is a list of flowers for cutting and for dried arrangements. Find out which ones will do well in your area.
Perennials Bird-of-paradise, black-eyed susan, chrysanthemum, coreopsis, forsythia, iris, lavender, lilac, lily, marguerite, old roses, Shasta daisy, and yarrow.
Annuals Baby’s-breath, bachelor’s button, bells of Ireland, calendula, cosmos, marigold, nasturtium, nicotiana, pincushion flower, snap-dragon, stock, sweet pea and zinnia.
Bulbs Anemone, daffodil, Dutch iris, freesia, narcissus, ranunculus, and tulips.
Wildflowers Black-eyed susan, California poppy (if seared), cattail, coreopsis, daisy, goldenrod, mullein, mustard, penstemon, prairie grasses, Queen Anne’s lace, tiger lily, wild roses, and yarrow.
Kitchen Gifts
Dried herbs add zest to your cooking. You can change an ordinary salad, for example, into an interesting, tasty salad simply by adding some freshly dried herbs. A soothing cup of tea can be brewed from a mixture of several varieties of dried mint. Also, herbs, harvested from your garden and carefully dried, are an especially welcome gift.
Drying Herbs
Drying herbs is a simple rewarding task. Dried herbs lose their potency with age, so you should renew your supply of them annually. It is important when harvesting herbs—basil, borage, cilantro, marjoram, mint, parsley, oregano, rosemary, sage, and thyme—for drying that you pick those that have not yet flowered. Pick during the driest part of the day. If necessary, wash the plants quickly and pat them dry. On a piece of screening, carefully place the leaves in a single layer, with no overlapping. Leave the screens out in a warm room away from sunlight for five to seven days, stirring the leaves occasionally. If the air is very humid or if you must dry the herbs quickly, put them in a very low oven (140 degrees F.) for a few hours, until they crumble fairly easily in your hand. When the herbs are thoroughly dry, store them in airtight containers and put them in a cool, dark place. For gift-giving, put them in small jars and label them in a decorative manner.
Drying Flowers
Take a bouquet of home-grown, dried flowers to your hosts when you dine out or to a sick friend. Flowers are a personal, beautiful, inexpensive—when you grow your own—gift that is always appreciated. If you have no room in your garden for an individual cutting garden, interplant a few of the easy-to-grow, compact varieties in your perennial border or vegetable garden. Choose from globe amaranth, love-in-a-mist, safflower, statice, and strawflower: they are the easiest to grow and dry. Harvest your flowers on a dry day just before they come into full bloom and bring them inside. Make small bunches of individual varieties and hang them in a warm, dry, fairly dark place—a dark corner of the kitchen or in the garage, perhaps. Once they are thoroughly dry, you can carefully arrange the flowers in baskets or vases and have them ready to give as gifts. Of course, you can enjoy them in your own home as well. After you have become successful at drying the flowers mentioned above, try some of the following varieties: baby’s-breath, bells of Ireland, celosia, Chinese lantern, goldenrod, grasses of all different types, heather, hollyhock, hydrangea, lavender, Queen Anne’s lace, tansy, and yarrow.
Wreaths
Wreaths are cherished symbols and have been used by humans for eons. While they are usually associated with Christmas, wreaths of herbs, dried flowers, pine cones, and vines are enjoyed the year round. Useful as inexpensive house decorations and as gifts, wreaths from the garden are easily constructed. A very simple wreath can be made of grapevines and other materials from the garden. Start with freshly pruned vines that are supple; dried-out vines will be hard to bend and weave. Determine the size of wreath you want to make: the thicker the vines, the larger the wreath should be because large vines are not as flexible as thin ones. If you want your wreath to be particularly symmetrical, start weaving it around a large bowl or round wastebasket. Because of the suppleness of the material and the ridges caused by the leaf stems, the woven vines tend to stay securely in place. When the wreath is the thickness you want, decorate it with clusters of dried flowers, herbs, grasses, and anything else that strikes your fancy.
Edible Organic Landscapes Are Money-Savers
Time is one of the factors that determine how much money you can save by gardening. How much time do you have to garden and how much time do you have for harvesting and preserving food? For a vegetable garden, planting time is needed in the spring and quite a bit of time is needed for harvesting in late summer. For the garden I recommend, plan to devote a few days in the spring to prepare the soil and to start annual vegetables. If your space is limited and you are going to put in French intensive beds, you will need twenty or thirty additional hours the first year to install the beds. After your soil is prepared and the seedlings are in, you will need three or four hours a week throughout the summer to weed, to tie up vines, to put in transplants, to harvest, and perhaps to water.
Not only is time necessary, but so is timing: putting in the time when it is needed. If you are a teacher, say, you may have plenty of time in the summer but little when school starts. For you, picking beans through the summer or making delicacies from edibles that produce in spring or summer, such as pickled beets and strawberry jam, may be no problem. However, your dreams of canning spaghetti sauce and making salsa from your dozen tomato plants that ripen in September, when new students need attention, would be disappointing and frustrating.
Another factor to consider is garden space. Some people create a problem here where none exists; or, at least, if there is a problem, it is usually easily solved. Many folks tell me that they would like to have a vegetable garden, but they don’t have the space. People seem to confuse having space with owning the garden. My partner and I gardened for years in a neighbor’s unused dog run. Garden space abounds in this country. Many cities and towns have community gardens; if yours doesn’t, you probably know a neighborly senior citizen or a friend who would be delighted to share space in return for some of your harvest. It doesn’t take much room to produce a lot of food.
A final important factor is your selection of edibles. Dwarf fruit trees give more yield for the space than full-size trees. Pole beans yield more beans than bush types. Vining cucumbers and melons yield more produce than bush types. Choose from the following list of high-yielding vegetables and fruits those that grow well in your area.
Vegetables
Artichokes, asparagus, basil, beans, beets, chard, cucumbers, eggplants, garlic, leeks, lettuce, parsley, peppers, scallions, shallots, snow peas, sorrel, sprouts, tomatoes, and zucchini. Fruits Alpine strawberries, apples, apricots, avocados, blackberries, blueberries, cherries, chestnuts, grapefruits, kiwis, lemons, mangoes, oranges, papayas, peaches, pears, pecans, pineapples, plums, raspberries, rhubarb, and strawberries.
Here are some other suggestions for planning your moneysaving food garden.
1. Interplant quick-growing annuals such as radishes and lettuce among your slow-growing vegetables.
2. Plant seeds when possible. Vegetable plants from the nursery are expensive. Save your own seeds from year to year when possible.
3. If your space is limited, plant in intensively prepared beds.
4. Compost anything you can get your hands on. Some city park departments distribute leaves and clippings to homeowners who want them for mulch and compost.
5. Use dwarf fruit trees whenever possible to produce more fruit from a limited area. The trees are dwarf, but the fruit is full size.
6. Replace barren ornamental plants with edibles. Many of the standard fruit trees and shrubs have long been overlooked as landscape material. Beautiful edibles such as blueberries, apples, almonds, plums, persimmons, and cherries, just to mention a few, have been overlooked in favor of flowering crabs, dogwoods, and forsythia.
7. If space is at a premium, avoid space-wasting plants such as winter squash, pumpkins, and corn.
8. Plant gourmet vegetables to help cut down on your entertaining costs.
Another way to save money is to preserve some of your harvest for winter eating, when produce prices are up. The most economical way to preserve some vegetables and fruits, such as carrots, potatoes, beets, cabbage, turnips, apples, and pears, is to put them in a root cellar; although drying is economical for apricots, peaches, plums, grapes, tomatoes, and herbs.
A Money-Saving Backyard
The diagram below shows a very small backyard full of bountiful, yet beautiful, plants: they do double duty. There are genetic dwarf fruit trees: two apples, a peach, and a pear. These flower and fruiting large shrubs make quite a delightful background for the patio area. On either side are black and red raspberry bushes trained on decorative trellises and clusters of blueberry bushes. On both sides of the patio and in the middle of the back planting bed is a combination vegetable and flower border, which is planted with extra-productive species such as tomatoes, snow peas, chard, peppers, and eggplants and flowers that are good for cutting, such as calendulas, statice, coreopsis, and baby’s breath.
The patio has containers for vegetables and herbs and is covered with an arbor that has two kiwi vines on it. Grapevines are espaliered on the south wall on either side of the house; with the kiwi vines on the arbor they provide shade on hot days and help cut air-conditioning bills. In addition, the grape prunings can be used to make wreaths in the winter.
A money-saving garden can be as small as this patio garden, which includes many features: it shades the house in summer, it provides flowers for gift-giving, and it produces vegetables and fruits for the table.
1. Genetic dwarf peach
2. Genetic dwarf apple
3. Black raspberries
4. Herb jar
5. Strawberries
6. Blueberries, three different varieties
7. Kiwi vine, female
8. Rhubarb
9. Grapevine trained on wall
10. Genetic dwarf pear
11. Red raspberries
12. Peppers in container
13. Zucchini in container
14. Cherry tomato in container
15. Kiwi vine, male
Recycled Materials
The materials are usually the most expensive items in any garden construction project. Projects using brick, stone, and concrete can make the budget groan. One way around the high cost of some of these items is to use recycled materials.
With the detailed plans in front of you, figure the dimensions of the items you want to construct. Then look at the list that follows and consider which recycled materials you may be able to use. If you must make adjustments, it will be simpler to make them on paper than after you have begun construction. For instance, railroad ties generally come in eight-foot lengths. They are hard to cut; therefore, if you are using them for a planter, it would make sense to design the planter with eight-foot increments in mind.
Recycled materials are available from a number of different sources, and one source may even be your own yard. I recycled the grapestakes from my own fence after the posts and stringers had rotted away. I reused bricks from my old patio that was buckled by some very invasive tree roots. I didn’t have enough bricks to make the new patio as large as I wanted, so I purchased 400 new ones, then made a pattern that combined the old and the new bricks. Other sources of recycled materials are contractors, demolition yards, nursery supply houses, and friends and neighbors.
1. Concrete. Recycled concrete, broken into 12-inch to 24-inch pieces, can be used as paving material for patios, paths, utility areas, retaining walls, and steps. You can recycle concrete from your own yard or from a nearby demolition project. If you decide to have the contractor dump a load of broken concrete in your front yard, you will have a disposal problem; that is, what to do with the pieces that are stained or too large or too small to use in your project. To avoid that problem it may be better to pick up the pieces at the demolition site. Concrete is very heavy, and only a limited number of pounds can be carried at one time in the average car. Therefore, it behooves you to locate the concrete as close as possible your yard. You will find concrete of different shades of gray and beige and made with different types of aggregates. Try to choose batches of compatible colors when combining concrete from more than one source. For paths, pieces of broken concrete can be set in sand and mortared in place or left unmortared and planted between the cracks with herbs or low ground-covers. For walls less than two feet high, the pieces can be mortared, or the areas between the slabs can be filled with soil and planted with cascading types of flowers and herbs. Walls over two feet high, of any type of material, including recycled concrete, should be built by a licensed contractor and overseen by a structural engineer.
2. Old lumber can be gathered from demolition sites, old barns, and sometimes from the beach. Used telephone poles and railroad ties are usually available from nursery supply houses. Pieces of new wood, usable but often in short lengths, are sometimes available from construction sites. Usually it is wood suitable for inside construction, which must be painted or treated with wood preservative if you are going to use it outside.
Old railroad ties are probably the most versatile recycled construction material of all. They can be placed horizontally for steps, planters, short walls, and decking; they can be placed vertically for retaining walls. Their major drawback is their price. Railroad ties have been treated with creosote, which, while protecting the wood from the elements, can sometimes ooze out and get on clothing or stain carpeting when it is tracked inside on shoes.
See also Rosalind’s Creating Bountiful Yards With Organic Edible Landscaping
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Rosalind Creasy is author of Rosalind Creasy’s Recipes From The Garden: 200 Exciting Recipes from the Author of the Complete Book of Edible Landscaping.
Images Credit: Rosalind Creasy
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