There are many reasons to grow your own food, or at least a portion of it. Like many gardeners, I was hooked at an early age. Working beside my mother in the garden, I was enchanted by the simple act of planting a seed. In my young eyes, seeds seemed little more than lifeless kernels, but once tucked into the earth they quickly sprouted, and before long the harvest followed. When we picked our vegetables — typically just before we intended to eat them — they were packed with flavor and tasted nothing like the limp grocery store veggies we ate the other nine months of the year.
Today I grow much of my family’s food, producing an organic bounty from our 2,000-square-foot garden. Over the years I’ve learned to stretch my harvest season to 365 days, which reduces our dependence on the “long-distance” vegetables found at our local supermarket. The ability to harvest from our winter cold frames and mini hoop tunnels from December through March — in Canada — is incredibly rewarding. Even if my children won’t eat all of the vegetables and herbs (c’mon, Swiss chard is delicious!), they know where their food comes from and how it grows.
Because edible gardening is such a large part of my life, I am always looking for new techniques, designs, and ideas to grow more food. With this in mind, I dedicated 18 months of my life to tracking (stalking?) avid gardeners, garden writers, professional horticulturists, television and radio hosts, garden bloggers, managers of botanical gardens, university staff, and community gardeners across North America and the United Kingdom to find out how and why they grow their own food. The result of that research is this book, which spotlights the rapidly growing trend of food gardening, offering 73 plans for edibles that I hope will inspire you to think differently about where and how you can grow food.
As you flip through this book, you’ll find that the garden plans are all extremely varied in size, shape, style, and location. Some are even placed in the front yard, an area traditionally reserved for grass. In today’s increasingly eco-conscious world, more and more gardens are sneaking from the back to the front yard. Although I don’t expect everyone to dig up the entire front property to grow food (like Shawna Coronado), you may decide to incorporate food plants that are both beautiful and productive into your front garden beds (like Kenny Point). Who knows, you may even inspire the neighbors!
Those whose only garden space is a windy rooftop or a concrete balcony can produce a bumper crop of organic food using plans that focus on “difficult” sites, such as the ornamental edible balcony garden by Andrea Bellamy, the author of Sugar Snaps and Strawberries and the blogger behind the popular site Heavy Petal. Or perhaps you’ll find inspiration from Jean Ann Van Krevelen, co-author of Grocery Gardening and the blogger at Gardener to Farmer. Jean Ann shows us how to jazz up a large deck or patio with delicious homegrown veggies, herbs, and fruits. Renee Shepherd created her seed company, Renee’s Garden, to provide gourmet, flavorful vegetables and herbs to home gardeners; here she has teamed up with Beth Benjamin to demonstrate how easy it is to grow good food in containers with their plan for a gourmet container garden. If a rooftop is the only sunny site you can find, check out the design by Colin McCrate and Hilary Dahl of the Seattle Urban Farm Company, which details growing techniques and edibles that do best in such an exposed site.
Gardeners living in deer, rabbit, or groundhog country may want to consider installing a fence around their food gardens. “Fencing a vegetable garden avoids so much heartache,” says Master Gardener, author, and blogger Marie Iannotti. “You can’t fault the animals for lusting after your tomatoes and cucumbers, but they don’t like to share.” She recommends an 8-foot-tall fence to exclude deer, while rabbits and groundhogs can be kept out with a 4-foot fence buried 18 inches below ground.
Common garden challenges like excess shade, tiny lots, or short seasons can quickly deflate a would-be gardener. Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. Marjorie Harris, author of 15 garden books, including Thrifty Gardening (her latest), tackles less-than-ideal light conditions in her “Partially Shaded Vegetables” plan. Theresa Loe, co-executive producer of the PBS television show Growing a Greener World, carves out an urban homestead in her small Los Angeles lot. Steven Biggs, the author of Grow Figs Where You Think You Can’t, has figured out how to enjoy bushels of Mediterranean figs in his Canadian backyard.
Those who aren’t limited by space restrictions may wish for the traditional style of the formal kitchen garden designed by famed food and garden writer Ellen Ecker Ogden. Jennifer Bartley, founder and principal of the design firm American Potager, inspires us with her plan for an ornamental kitchen garden that is both bountiful and beautiful. Prolific food and garden writer and New York Times columnist Leslie Land shows us how to grow what we can’t buy with her “Modern Truck Garden” plan.
Amanda Thomsen — the sassy author and blogger behind Kiss My Aster — is in a class by herself with her funky design for an authentic “Chicago Hot-Dog Garden.” (Add ketchup at your own risk!) And while you’re enjoying your hot dog, peruse the “Cocktail Garden” plan by Amy Stewart and Susan Morrison; their garden will help you explore the age-old connection between good food and drink. Or read what Stephen Westcott-Gratton, the senior horticultural editor of Canadian Gardening magazine, has to say about some of the unique vegetables of history with his “Elizabethan Garden.” Following the theme of unconventional gardens, take a peek at the plan by Ellen Zachos, author of Backyard Foraging, who shares the design of her own New York garden where she grows wild edibles.
Jessi Bloom, author of Free-Range Chicken Gardens, combines chickens and food plants in her plan for a chicken garden. Chickens also play a key role in the plan designed by Emma Cooper, a U.K. author, blogger, and Master Composter. Her “Circle of Life” plot is visually stunning but also incredibly practical, allowing plenty of space for vegetables, herbs, fruits, chickens, and waste recycling.
Several contributors designed edible gardens that not only produce food, but also encourage and support populations of bees, beneficial bugs, and other important pollinators. Jessica Walliser, the author of Attracting Beneficial Bugs to Your Garden and Good Bug, Bad Bug, shares her plan for a “good bug” garden, which includes a tempting mix of veggies, herbs, and flowers. Paul Zammit, the Nancy Eaton Director of Horticulture at the Toronto Botanical Garden, has designed a smaller pollinator-friendly edible raised bed, as well as a portable pollinator pot that will sustain pollinators wherever it is placed.
All gardeners want to reap maximum yield from their plots, and cultivating healthy plants is the best way to ensure a bountiful harvest. For healthy plants, follow these steps:
1. Feed your soil. Healthy, high-producing plants grow in rich, organic soil. Feed your soil with compost, aged manure, and other soil amendments before planting and between successive crops.
2. Check the soil. If productivity declines, have a soil test done to see what is going on. A basic soil test will tell you the pH level (aim for 5.5 to 7.0) and the percentage of organic matter (5 percent is ideal). It will also tell you the levels of the three primary nutrients (nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium), as well as what you need to add to your soil to bring these nutrients up to optimum amounts.
3. Try a cover crop. There is no easier and less expensive way to boost soil than by sowing a cover crop like buckwheat, winter rye, oats, or cowpeas. The folks at Growing Places Indy suggest adding a cover crop into your seasonal rotation so that one portion of the garden is always planted with a cover crop. “It is much better to cover crop or mulch soil through the winter than to leave it barren and open to erosion and weed growth,” they advise.
4. Rotate those crops. By growing vegetables of the same family together (for example, tomatoes, potatoes, and peppers), and then moving them from bed to bed each year, you will reduce disease and pest issues. Plus, different crops use different nutrients. By rotating your vegetables, you can reduce nutrient deficiencies. For example, corn is a nitrogen pig and should be followed with a nitrogen-fixing, soil-enriching crop such as beans or peas to support soil health.
Many experts created edible gardens that also serve as landscape features. Debra Prinzing, author of The 50 Mile Bouquet and the recently released Slow Flowers, designed an edible cutting garden that will add much beauty to a backyard with her appealing — and delicious — combination of herbs, vegetables, berries, and fruits. Charlie Nardozzi is the author of Northeast Fruit & Vegetable Gardening and host of In the Garden on WCAX Channel 3 in Vermont. He’s a strong advocate of edible landscaping and has designed an edible hedge that is both productive and ornamental.
Children can — and should — be taught to grow food, and what better way to introduce them to a garden than by capturing their imagination as well as their taste buds? The “Garden Squares for Kids” design by Karen Liebreich and Jutta Wagner is a childhood delight that mixes fun and food in four charming mini-gardens. Lure children in with their favorite food — pizza! — by breaking ground on a pizza garden, inspired by the OTTO Pizza Garden at the New York Botanical Garden.
Smaller-scale plans make great weekend projects. Try Jayme Jenkins’s “Hanging Gutters” or the “Pallet Garden” provided by Joe Lamp’l, host of Growing a Greener World on PBS. Even the edible edging described by Helen Yoest (“An Easy Way to Expand Your Existing Garden,” here) can be installed in mere hours for years of juicy gourmet strawberries.
As I talked to the many contributors of this book, I heard the same advice, time and again: “Grow what you like to eat.” Many of the designers balked at the thought of suggesting individual varieties to accompany their garden plans because they wanted to encourage gardeners to experiment in their own plots, and to grow vegetables, herbs, and fruits that would do well in their individual regions. Therefore, don’t feel tied down to the plant lists; rather, take them as they are — suggestions. One of the greatest pleasures of being a food gardener is exploring the diverse range of crops and varieties available through seed companies, so have fun trying a handful of new vegetables and herbs each season.
Need some more guidance? Avid blogger, gardener, and author Daniel Gasteiger provides these questions you can ask yourself to help narrow your search:
1. What do you like to eat that you can grow in your climate and space?
2. Of those foods, which taste most noticeably better when you grow them yourself?
3. Of those foods, which provide the highest value? (For example, at a farmers’ market, beans are cheap and raspberries expensive.)
4. Will you preserve any of your homegrown produce, and if so, how much time do you have for preserving?
5. Most importantly: What will make you happiest, even if it doesn’t rank among the other criteria?
At the end of the day, if you get no more out of this book than the message that food can be grown anywhere — especially with some creative thinking — then I will feel that I’ve done my job. Of course, I also hope to reinforce the idea that edible plants can be just as beautiful, if not more so, than ornamental plants. Think dinosaur or ‘Redbor’ kale, purple cabbage, curly parsley, architectural leeks, and the many colors and textures of lettuce, for example. An unexpected consequence of writing this book is that I’ve begun to seriously rethink my own garden. I’ve started to sketch out a new plan, adapting elements from many of the designs in this book for my “new and improved” kitchen plot.
I am so grateful to the many contributors of this project, who have inspired me with their creativity and expertise. I hope you enjoy peeking into their gardens as much as I have.
