02321 Edible Landscaping

Plant your own garden and decorate your soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers. — Veronica A. Shoffstall

When people think about growing food in urban areas, their first idea is to hide a vegetable garden somewhere in the backyard. All too often that means "out of sight, out of mind.”

In reality, the possibilities for food growing in urban areas are much more imaginative and extensive than the traditional backyard garden.

Since growing space in cities must compete for space with all other urban functions, it is important to stack the function of food production with other important urban functions.

One such urban design element that can serve several functions is landscaping. Let us count the functions of urban landscaping:

1. Shade
2. Beauty
3. Cleansing the air
4. Sequestering carbon and giving off oxygen (via photosynthesis)
5. Wildlife refuge and food (animals, birds, insects)
6. Adds value to properties
7. Annual leaf litter fall feeds soil as it decomposes (composts)
8. Delineates boundaries
9. Moderates the urban heat island effect.
10. Produces high quality nutritious food at low cost

Food production is the proverbial cherry on top of that ice cream sundae.

Let’s think about a forest for a moment. We can easily find seven different layers of vegetation:

1. mature canopy trees,
2. under story trees,
3. shrubs and bushes,
4. herbs
5. ground covers,
6. climbing vines,
7. roots.

We find micro flora and fauna, as well as insects, worms, and other wildlife. All contribute to the greater whole around them.

On private property, the job of incorporating edible plants with landscaping is fairly straightforward if the property owner agrees. Public, institutional, or commercial properties will be somewhat more involved, due to the additional stakeholders.

Our collective iPermie goal is to get as much edible landscaping in place in urban areas as possible. We need more fruits and nuts in urban areas!

In all your urban designs, do your bests to fill all seven layers of a forest, as identified above, don’t solely restrict yourself to fruit and nut trees.

How?

Keeping in mind Section 1's lessons on invisible structures, we can sketch some ideas as follows.

Sell the benefits, not the ideology. Don’t talk about global warming or peak oil or brittle food systems. Instead, go on — at length — about the benefits of edible landscaping.

Start with religious institutions and schools, including universities and colleges. Both educate young people and have concerns about meeting the needs of low income people. Point out how expensive fruits and nuts are, and how useful it would be to have additional local production of fruits and nuts. Point out the advantages of fruit and nut trees for teaching biology and botany. When approaching a particular religious institution, it is always helpful to have someone on board who is a member at that location. The same is true of schools. Getting parents and teachers involved early on helps build for success.

Listen to what the group is interested in. If you want to install forest gardens at local schools, spend time talking with the stakeholders at each school so you can respond to their actual needs and desires.

Offer all of the information they will need to make an informed decision. Establishing urban edible landscape plantings can be work intensive, and you will have more success in encouraging people to do this work, and pay for the expenses if they start with a complete written presentation, including cost and time estimates. Be prepared to produce such a design for the group, with their assistance. Work with your local county extension office to compile lists of recommended varieties of edible landscaping plants for your area.

Promote an Economy of Abundance. One comment you will hear is “all the fruit will be grabbed by a few.” Counter such concerns with discussions of the advantages of an economy of abundance and suggestions to plant more trees and design a system for sharing the fruit.

Let’s review some permaculture principles and strategies as applied to designing urban edible landscaping.

1. Observation.

"Gardener, know thy land," would be the gardening equivalent of "Physician, heal thyself." You can learn a lot by simply looking at the land that is the object of your design, whether it is great or small. Consider my little 1/7th of an acre. You wouldn't think a little patch like that would have microclimates but it does. I have cold spots and warm spots, some places are dry and others wet. My learning processes and impacts on this land are works in progress, so the need for observation never ends. If I plant a tree, it will change that place. Before you start, spend time simply observing the land. Some things, like trees, can’t be moved once they get established. Think hard about where you put your trees.

Observation includes you as the garden designer and the other stakeholders in the community. All of this impacts your design. If you think about the whole field of landscape design, it's easy to see there are many schools and many possible ideas for design principles. For example, a formal garden would be absolutely symmetrical, balanced, lots of straight edges and if there are curves, they are perfect. A more natural garden would not be so symmetrical, there wouldn't be many straight edges and curves might take many shapes. Between these two poles there are many options. Spend time observing yourself and your community.

2. Multiple uses.

Edible flowers —

1. are beautiful,
2. are tasty to eat, and
3. attract bees and beneficial insects.

Logs used as landscape elements provide —

1. habitat and food for worms and other little critters,
2. places for humans to sit,
3. cat petting perches,
4. are aesthetically pleasing to look at, and
5. potentially could grow mushrooms.

Not a bad deal for something that a lot of people would just throw away.

The vines on a trellis —

1. yield grapes (wine & jam),
2. leaves (mulch and stuffed grape leaves),
3. provide shade.
4. Provide food and shelter for wildlife including birds and bees.

Mulch —

1. moderates the temperatures of the ground,
2. helps control weeds,
3. encourages earthworms, and
4. composts in place, thus feeding soil flora and fauna and the plants.

Not bad for something that people put in plastic bags and bury in holes in the ground. There's lots that has to be done even in a small garden ecosystem, and it's better for the plants to do their job than for the gardener to rush around doing backbreaking labor and spending piles of cash to make up for the lack of a functioning ecosystem in the garden.

3. Relative location.

Everything in the garden connects to everything else. If you ignore the way plants interact with each other and the environment, you're just making extra work for yourself. If you look at nature, nothing grows in isolation, and also not in monocultures. Rather, plants exist in communities. You have mature trees, under story trees, climbing vines, herbs, and etc. all growing together, mutually supporting each other.

Permaculturists talk about plant guilds in the same way that vegetable gardeners talk about companion planting. For example, a plant guild centered on a fruit tree would want plants that are nutrient accumulators, nitrogen fixers, mulch producers, bee plants, pest repellants and ground covers, while at the same time producing useful products. Everything has places in the garden where it will do well, and where it will do not so well. The trick is to find good places for everything so they can do their work as plants, thus taking a load off the gardener's back.

4. Many elements support each important function.

Multiple elements supporting critical functions is vital for resilience. Consider what happened in Ireland due to the potato blight. How many millions starved or immigrated because one plant failed? Natural systems incorporate a diversity of species of flora and fauna, and so must the edible landscape. If you come to my house for a salad in summer, it will have maybe 15 different items. Imagine what an upscale restaurant would charge for such a plate. I think that ultimately we will have more than 200 different varieties of useful or edible plants growing on our little land. It will take a few more years to get there.

5. Design for energy efficiency

Edible landscaping must be designed for energy efficiency. Energy refers to fossil fuels. It also is about human effort. High maintenance designs will not be popular with the urban institutions you want as edible landscape cooperators.

Thus, it is better to front-load some work at the beginning, as you set things up, so there is less to do later. The best kind of front-loaded work of course is intelligent design so you don't waste time, money, effort, or resources, while at the same time achieving a sustainable yield that can be harvested for the benefit of the community.

Edible landscaping moderates the urban heat island effect and reduces the need for air conditioning in buildings shaded by trees, shrubs, and vines.

Once you plant an apple tree, you don't have to plant it again next year. This is one of the real advantages of perennial edible landscaping plants.

6. Use biological resources, minimize inputs.

It’s always tempting to spend money for quick fixes, but biological resources are better — and they cost less money. Play the frugality card early and often when pitching urban edible landscaping designs. Chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides add to the expense of urban landscapes and they carry hidden externalized costs that are often not talked about.

There is no necessity that requires the use of pesticides, herbicides, and chemical fertilizers. Pesticides, herbicides, and chemical fertilizers come into play when humans have destroyed an ecosystem or when we fail to create or properly manage an effectively working ecosystem. It makes no sense to destroy the soil that should nourish plants. The point of the careful design work that needs to go into urban edible landscape design is to create systems that have no need for chemical fertilizers or herbicides/pesticides.

7. Energy/resource cycling.

Due to poor design, energy sinks proliferate our present system. We spend piles of money to heat water and then throw all that heat away by draining the hot water into a cold sewer in the ground, without even trying to at least recover the useful heat, not to mention reuse the water. Many such examples of flagrant waste and energy gluttony could be cited. We should remember what our grandparents told us: WASTE NOT, WANT NOT.

One way to waste not want not in gardening is to recycle organic materials to make compost. Turn food scraps, garden waste, newspaper and etc. into useful compost via natural processes. If not composted, we throw them in the trash and bury them in a landfill or wash them down a sewer via a "disposal.” Kitchen disposal's should be renamed as "money shredders" or "wealth wasters" because that's what they are.

Natural forests and prairies do not waste energy in this matter. Everything cycles and recycles. The more your community does this, the less work you have to do, the healthier the garden will be, and the more bountiful will be the harvest.

8. Work with natural forces, not against them

In nature, if a piece of earth becomes bare, plants rush in to heal the breach. First come plants that we call weeds, then bushes and later the trees. This is the principle of natural succession. In an edible gardening landscape, you help this process along by substituting useful or edible plants for volunteers.

Much gardening and landscaping these days is a matter of working against, not with, nature. From this attitude of opposition and dominance comes our heavy reliance on commercial fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. We kill the natural fertility with poisons and chemicals, and then we try to grow plants in a dead growing medium by substituting artificial fertilizers for the complex natural system that has worked pretty well for several hundred million years.

But even if we avoid chemical traps, there are still plenty of ways we work against, rather than with nature.

People often come by my house and they want to help. Generally, the first thing they do is to reach down and pluck up a dandelion (dandelions grow in just about every part of my property). This is such a problem I want to put up small signs here and there — "Please don't pluck the dandelions." Dandelions are incredibly useful. Their long taproot brings up trace nutrients from down deep, they contribute to mulch, and all parts of them are edible. Not to mention how pretty their yellow blossoms look. Pulling them works against nature. It is better to let them alone, and enjoy their beauty and usefulness, and let them do their job, thus working with nature. Planting and encouraging nutrient accumulator plants is a way to use biological resources. If you pluck a dandelion, you should eat it or make wine from the flowers.

Another biological tactic is to create polycultures of annual and perennial plants. Nature abhors monocultures, and insect pests love monocultures. Planting polycultures (many species of plants gathered together in a location) minimizes the pest problem and is more beautiful than monocultures.

Perhaps the most important thing is to pay attention to the soil. Much of what we do in landscaping, such as tilling, and using pesticides, herbicides, and chemical fertilizers, harms the long term health of the soil. Herbicides and pesticides destroy the micro flora and fauna that are essential to healthy soil. With lots of earth worms, you won't need to till. It is better to let the worms do their job rather than task a human with backbreaking labor to do the worms’ job.

“Do no harm” is another biological strategy we all need to practice so we can get good at it.

9. Optimize edge.

In ecology, it is evident that such "edges" between ecosystems are more productive and diverse than the either of the neighboring systems. Edges are good, and that is true of both the garden as a whole and its various parts. One advantage of a curved line over a straight line in a garden is that more plants can grow along curve than a straight line.

10. Use natural patterns.

Nature doesn't have a lot of straight lines and square edges, and neither does my garden. One thing that makes vegetable gardens not front yard material is that many people do straight rows. There is no biological reason for planting vegetables in a monoculture straight line. Cabbages and broccoli can grow just fine in curved rows and circles, scattered among flowers.

11. Appropriate Scale. Permaculturists speak of small systems, and that is the scale that most gardeners work at.

Always start small. Don’t immediately dive in and try to come up with a plan for a 160-acre urban park. Start with a few small designs for fruit tree guilds at schools and religious institutions in your neighborhood.

Appropriate size is a consideration when you put things together in the garden. There are always lots of details to consider

That’s one reason we do written plans.

12. Use succession. Don't dig up some turf, fill it with tree-sized hole, and plant a bunch of trees. First things first. In this case, we want to invest in the fertility of the soil. That calls for building up from the ground. So we mulch and plant nitrogen fixing and nutrient accumulating plants. Once these plants have had a chance to prepare the ground to receive them, then you can plant the trees.

13. Use color and texture effectively. Edible landscaping in an urban area has many functions stacked on it. One of those is beauty, so it's important to use color and textures effectively. Useful and edible plants are colorful and have varied textures and the colors and textures can be combined effectively to create incredible displays. The first year that I used crimson clover as a cover crop brought a nice surprise. In early spring, beautiful crimson flowers covered my yard and garden beds. People driving by would stop and ask, "What is that growing there on your yard?" Many plants considered to be ornamentals are edible, this is especially true of flowers. Every part of the day lily plant is edible — flowers, roots, and leaves. Rose petals are edible as are the hips (which are a major source of vitamin C), as are Rose of Sharon flowers and red bud flowers ( the red bud seeds may be ground for flower). Rye can be as beautiful as ornamental grasses. Purple coneflowers besides being beautiful are an important medicine plant.

Winter color can be found among the hardy edibles such as purple, pink, and green kale. Arugula (a self seeding annual salad crop) is green in the winter, as is salad burnet and French sorrel, and of course the sage. Oregon grapes, besides producing an edible berry, have glorious copper colored foliage. Rue is a nice silver green that is still bright in the winter. For Thanksgiving I made a table decoration with branches of tarragon, rue, Oregon grape, horehound, and arugula, and sprinkled bright red rose hips around it. And of course, the vetch and clovers grow all winter long. The lemon and chocolate mints are still green and thriving, even after snow. Swiss chard is a colorful plant that survives into winter and as an edible it is a "cut and come again" staple.

Fall and spring color are found among the edibles. In spring there are blossoms on the fruit trees and berry plants, and I highly recommend the sand plums for beautiful orange and red fall foliage, as well as the interesting shapes in which they grow

Many wildflowers are edible or medicinal or produce dyes, and many of them that are suitable for this area are local natives. Another show stopper is the Maximilian sunflower, which produces multi-branched plants covered with yellow blossoms.

Final Thoughts.

The best time to plant an edible forest was twenty years ago. The next best time is today. Invest in the fertility of the soil for at least a year before planting trees and larger shrubs and you will see a benefit in the growth and establishment of your trees and shrubs.