Edible Landscaping

Author Rosalind Creasy creates gardens that celebrate the beauty of edible plants. They are colorful, organic and bountiful. The fruits, vegetables and herbs become gorgeous plates of healthy and delicious food for body and soul.

Rosalind Creasy

Back in the 1970s, when Rosalind Creasy coined the term "edible landscaping," home gardens looked a lot different than they do today. Flowers and vegetables were never allowed to mix. Everyone tended to plant the same varieties of plants (red salvia, oak leaf lettuce) and keep them in orderly beds and rows. Flowers were appropriate for around the house, but vegetables belonged in a plot of their own out back. Shrubs were restricted to foundation planting or defining the edge of the yard.

Rosalind saw things a bit differently. Sure a bed of zinnias and dahlias was pretty. But was it more beautiful than a bush weighed down under a haze of blueberries? An 8-foot border of asparagus fronds? A pergola enveloped in purple pea pods?

By teaching classes, giving tours, taking photographs and writing more than a dozen book titles, Rosalind gradually chipped away at people’s expectations about what a garden should look like. She helped us see that there was a whole world beyond Big Boy tomatoes, California Wonder peppers and Blue Lake bush beans. How could we ignore arugula, red romaine lettuce, fennel, striped eggplants, orange tomatoes and yellow raspberries?

The new edition of Edible Landscaping.

Rosalind practices what she preaches. The gardens that surround her home celebrate the beauty of edible plants. Her gardens are colorful, organic and bountiful. The fruits, vegetables and herbs become gorgeous plates of healthy and delicious food for body and soul.

The first edition of Edible Landscaping was hailed by the New York Times as the best garden book of 1982. Now, almost 30 years later, Rosalind has released a completely revised version of this classic book. Six years in the making, the new Edible Landscaping is a gorgeous, full-color guide to the way we garden today. If you want to get inspired for the coming gardening season, you won’t be disappointed. Thank you Ros!

Rosalind is a terrific speaker. Check out where she will be appearing this spring.

—Kathy LaLiberté
Gardener's Supply

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The Value of Hedges

By late autumn the garden is fading fast and most herbaceous plants have all but disappeared from the landscape. In my perennial gardens, this means that means most of the visual interest has disappeared as well.

By late autumn the garden is fading fast and most herbaceous plants have all but disappeared from the landscape. In my perennial gardens, this means that means most of the visual interest has disappeared as well.

That wouldn't be the case if I had some hedges. A recent trip to England reminded me what an important role evergreen hedges can play in the garden.

—Kathy LaLiberte
Director of Gardening, Gardener's Supply

Hedges Slideshow

Slideshow:Hedges To see captions, click on the image. To share comments or explore further, go to Flickr.

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Sweet Grow Beds

We recently shared our great results about growing sweet potatoes in the Grow Bags. What about raised beds? What about extra-deep raised beds? We planted three Grow Beds. Each was filled with a blend of 70 percent container mix, 20 percent topsoil and 10 percent compost. To determine if a deeper planting area would yield more tubers, we made one of the beds twice as deep as the other two by stacking two 10-inch beds. Three rooted sweet potato slips were planted into each bed.

Harvesting from the Grow Bed is easy: Just pull out the corner pins.

In the foreground are the two 10-inch beds. We stacked two Grow Beds to create the 20-inch bed at the back.

Deer damage was a problem all summer, as seen on the left side, but the plants were remarkably resilient.

Last May we planted sweet potato slips in both Grow Bags and Grow Beds.

We recently shared our great results about growing sweet potatoes in the Grow Bags. As for the Grow Beds, we planted three of them. Each was filled with a blend of 70 percent container mix, 20 percent topsoil and 10 percent compost. To determine if a deeper planting area would yield more tubers, we made one of the beds twice as deep as the other two by stacking two 10″ beds. Three rooted sweet potato slips were planted into each bed.

Our summer was relatively wet, so the plants had plenty of water. We had no pest problems other than deer. Our resident deer herd munched the foliage on a pretty regular basis. At several points during the season the plants were completely defoliated, but the vines always put out new leaves within a few days. Had the plants been able to put all their energy into making tubers instead of producing new leaves, our yields would surely have been higher.

Here are the results:

• Bed 1: 10″ Grow Bed: 13.4 lbs.
• Bed 2: 10″ Grow Bed: 12.96 lbs.
• Bed 3: 20″ Grow Bed: 20.76 lbs.

As you can see in the photos, the plants in the 10″ deep beds were crowded and most of the tubers they produced were intertwined and underdeveloped. For that size bed, two plants would have been better than three.

The stacked, 20″ deep bed gave the three plants enough room to develop relatively normal tubers. With adequate growing space, the yield from the same number of plants was almost double.

Conclusion? Resist the temptation to overplant. Sweet potatoes produce higher yields when they have plenty of loose, friable soil in which to develop their tubers. Going forward, we'll consider 15 gallons of soil per plant (the amount in one of our Potato Grow Bags) to be the minimum.

More Information

• How to Grow Sweet Potatoes
• Growing Sweet Potatoes in a Grow Bag: Results from our test garden.

—Kathy LaLiberte
Director of Gardening, Gardener's Supply

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Shredded Leaves Insulate

Mother Nature has provided the perfect way to protect plants from winter cold: a thick blanket of leaves. But unfortunately, leaves rarely fall where they're needed. It's the delphinium, roses and hydrangeas that need to be blanketed in leaves, not the lawn.

The delphinium beds, protected with a layer of leaves, anchored down with Shade Netting.

Shredding leaves with the Deluxe Electric Leaf Shredder.

Winter is hard on gardeners, but it can be deadly to plants. Extreme cold can kill tender plant tissues and fluctuations in soil temperature can severely damage a plant's roots and crown.

Fortunately, Mother Nature has provided the perfect solution: a thick blanket of leaves. But unfortunately, leaves rarely fall where they're needed. It's the delphinium, roses and hydrangeas that need to be blanketed in leaves, not the lawn.

Secondly, shredded leaves make much better insulators than whole ones. Shredded leaves create a fluffy, air-filled layer whereas whole leaves tend to mat together and trap moisture.

For the gardener, that means a little raking and shredding are in order.

Some years I rake the leaves in my yard into giant piles and then use an electric leaf shredder to create a uniform, finely textured mulch. This year I didn’t have the time for raking and running them through the leaf shredder.

So with just a couple hours before dark on a chilly November afternoon, I decided to see how fast I could get the leaves cleaned up, get the tender plants insulated, and lay in a stash of some leaves for mulching next spring.

I spent the first 20 minutes raking leaves out of the shrubs and corners where they’d lodged over the past couple weeks. I then put the bagger attachment on my lawn mower, roared over to those piles of leaves and ran over them. After being mowed over, the leaves would have to be called “ripped up” rather than shredded. But this year, that was good enough.

The first 10 or 12 bagger-loads went on the delphinium beds. All the crowns of the plants were generously covered with an 8- to 12-inch layer of leaves. Then, before the wind came up, I covered those beds with lengths of shade netting and anchored the netting to the ground with Earth Staples. I did the same thing last year and it worked great. The netting held the leaves in place all winter long, it almost disappears in the landscape, and it allows the plants and soil to breathe. It took about 10 minutes to finish the job. One more great use for shade netting.

By the time the light began to fade, the yard was looking tidy, the beds were mulched, and I had seven bags of leaves nestled under a tarp until next spring. Another fall job checked off, with that extra satisfaction of having made good use of something free!

More information

• Put Fall Leaves to Work
• How to Make Leaf Mold

—Kathy LaLiberte
Director of Gardening, Gardener's Supply

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