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Two

CREATING A FOODSCAPE FRAMEWORK: The Ornamentals

TO HAVE A FOODSCAPE, you have to have an ornamental plant framework. The area closely surrounding your home is known as the foundation landscape. You probably already have a good balance of ornamental plantings and open space. So why even talk about adding ornamental (mostly non-edible) plants since I keep telling you that this is simple and that you don’t have to start over? In case you’re apprehensive, I promise this isn’t a bait-and-switch.

It’s possible that the foundation landscape around your house is thin or that you think the plants are ugly. Maybe they’re old and overgrown and you want to start fresh, or maybe they’re young and boring. Perhaps you’d just like to add more evergreens for year-round interest or to provide a better backdrop for your edibles. Your rainbow chard will look better growing in front of a boxwood than in front of nothing at all.

The important thing is to find a balance between ornamentals and edibles. Ornamentals, oddly enough, are the most critical part of the foodscape, as they are the permanent features that add color, texture and biodiversity. If your entire landscape were all food, you wouldn’t know where to begin and you would be overwhelmed by having to replace everything seasonally.

Peanuts growing in a formal landscape.

Design Styles

No matter the style of garden you prefer – from English cottage garden to minimalist – there are beautiful ways to integrate food into it. In new developments particularly, you will primarily be dealing with a young and underdeveloped formal design. Almost every house will have a base layer of permanent evergreen shrubs that will eventually grow together (that’s how people in older houses ended up with monster yew hedges out front that require a backhoe to remove). A newer landscape is one of the easiest to start with in terms of adding food because there’s still plenty of open space and sunshine.

Assessing and Improving the Ornamental Landscape

If you inherited a landscape full of plants you don’t like, creating a foodscape gives you the opportunity to start anew. If, on the other hand, you’re fine with the ornamentals already in place but want to make the landscape more functional, simply start by improving on what you inherited.

The first thing I do as a designer is to add biodiversity through the ornamental plant collection. The developer-planted landscapes I see where I live include a lot of plants in the holly family, so I start by adding in different families of plants. By increasing biodiversity, you’re encouraging the arrival of more beneficial insects and pollinators, which, in the long run, benefits the edibles. Some of my go-to plants for a Southern foodscape include Encore^® azaleas, Knock Out^® roses, butterfly bushes, hydrangeas, quince and fall and spring blooming camellias. I also like to incorporate native plants such as Fothergilla and Itea which have beautiful fall foliage and flowers that provide nectar seasonally. The most important part of being a designer is to understand and meet the needs of my client. I want to know what the goals of each unique the foodscape are – what colors, textures and seasons do my clients want to experience? It’s important to me to ask what they like – if they’re happier with pink flowers, or blue, or if they want landscape interest during a particular season.

If you’re confused about the plants in your foundation landscape, find a reputable landscape designer in your area and get some feedback about how large they’re likely to grow, when they’ll bloom (or not), whether they’re evergreen, and if they have any special soil requirements. For example, azaleas grow best in slightly acidic soil, which is not necessarily optimal for cabbage family plants. Also, if you know the name of a plant, there are many online sites where you can find advice.

Emphasis on Trees and Shrubs

Foodscaping focuses on two main plant groups because they are relatively easy to grow: 1) ornamental trees and shrubs, and 2) seasonal annuals (a mix of flowers and edibles). Trees and shrubs go in the ground and go to town. A bit of pruning for structure every now and then and a seasonal hit of organic fertilizer and they’re good to go. You plant annuals each season, reap the benefits, and then yank them out. If you’ve grown a petunia, you can grow lettuce; they’re both seasonal annuals.

‘Limelight’ hydrangea makes a good backdrop for a basil edge.

A third plant group, perennials, can be more challenging to deal with because you find yourself struggling with these common questions: When should I cut back? When should I divide them? How do I plant perennials to make sure there’s something pretty and colorful blooming all of the time?

In my experience as a home gardener I find it easier to start a design with woody ornamentals, such as trees and shrubs, that don’t disappear underground in winter and will retain a year-round structure in the garden – and then think about incorporating flowering plants that add color and texture. I have become very selective about the perennial plants that I grow as some varieties can spread vigorously or reseed, taking up space that I’d rather devote to growing food.

It ultimately comes down to what garden maintenance tasks do you enjoy? I don’t like digging and divining; I prefer sowing seed and replanting each season. There’s no harm in adding well-behaved perennials but don’t beat yourself up if you choose to stick to lower-maintenance plants in your foodscape. Give yourself permission to make the most out of your landscape on your terms.

Plant Types: A Few Examples

Woody Ornamentals (plants that keep their woody structure and don’t die back to the ground in winter)

• Azalea

• Hydrangea

• Crape Myrtle

• Camellia

• Yew

Perennials (plants that die to the ground in fall and winter, but keep their rootstock and come back in the spring for two or more years)

• Agastache

• Black-Eyed Susan

• Penstemon

• Purple Coneflower

• Sedum ‘Autumn Joy’

Purple coneflower

Colorful & Dependable Annual Flowers for Your Foodscape

If you’d like to add annual flowers to your foodscape, here are some good options. They’re easy to grow from seed most anywhere and pack a punch with pollinators.

Cuphea

Melampodium

Warm Season Annuals

I find that my summer plant palette has more flowering annuals than edibles because of where I live; my options for food crops that I can grow in the heat of the Carolina summer are a bit slim. If you live in a cooler region, you might have more edibles overlapping seasons than I do.

• Callibrochoa

• Celosia

• Coleus

• Cuphea

• Lantana

• Marigold

• Melampodium (it reseeds, but is easy to pull out)

• Perilla (pull it out before it goes to seed)

• Salvia, annual varieties

• Zinnia

Cool Season Annuals

• Alyssum

• Calendula

• Ornamental Kale and Cabbage

• Petunia

• Snapdragon

• Viola

Cactus-flower zinnia

Fruit & Nut Trees in the Ornamental Framework

I don’t bother much with fruit trees. They require so much work in order to get them to produce edible fruit, and there are lots of great organic options at the grocery and farmers’ markets for staples like apples, peaches and pears. Of course, there’s nothing stopping you from growing fruit trees, but I find the time, energy and money required to get a substantial harvest is not worth it. I will, however, plant some native trees that produce hard-to-find fruits that don’t ship well. Persimmons and paw paws are wonderful options because they’re easy. Instead of an ornamental pear (please never plant one of those), try a paw paw; they’re on the smaller side and they produce delicious fruits!

As for nut-bearing trees, if you have room for larger shade trees, plant a pecan or chestnut, but be sure to position it on the north side of the bed so it doesn’t steal sunlight from your other edible plants. Almond and hazelnut are slightly smaller and can be inter-planted with the shrubs and seasonal edibles.

Plants for Your Region

Important note: As you’ve seen, I have been using my North Carolina foodscape as a template and I have mentioned a few of my favorite ornamental plants – some of which may not do as well in other parts of North America. And there are lots of plants that I can’t grow successfully that do beautifully elsewhere. If you’d like some plant selection advice for your area, please visit the extensive plant-list section at the back of the book, “Ornamentals for Every Region.” It can help give you some inspiration in designing your foodscape framework.

Planting the Ornamental Framework: Trees and Shrubs

The next chapter will focus mostly on planting the seasonal edibles, and the techniques and issues specific to them. But first, here’s your crash course on planting trees and shrubs.

Prepare the Soil

Whenever you’re about to embark on a big gardening project, it’s a good idea to have your soil tested. That way, you’ll know exactly what you’re working with. What’s in the soil (or not in the soil), in addition to the soil pH and structure, has a huge impact on plant health. If you do end up needing to make some adjustments to the soil, better to do that as you’re planning.

To test your soil, download the necessary instructions and forms from your local Cooperative Extension office. Extension services originate from land grant universities such as Purdue University (my alma matter) or NC State, near my house. They have offices throughout each state, regardless of where the “mothership” university is. You can look up information about soil testing and download forms from the website for your state’s extension agency. All you’ll have to do is mail in or drop off the soil sample. You’ll get a report via mail or email.

Interpreting a Soil Test

The soil test will give you some specific information to act upon. Test results will tell you about certain qualities of the soil, including:

• Soil pH

• Soil class (mineral, mineral organic, organic)

• Humic matter percentage

• CEC (Cation Exchange Capacity)

• Macro nutrients: levels of nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P) and potassium (K).

• Micro nutrients: including, but not limited to, levels of magnesium, copper, sulfur and calcium

These numbers, and the way the soil characteristics they indicate interact, will lead to the more important (for gardeners) parts of the soil test, which are the lime and fertilizer recommendations compiled from an analysis of the data contained in the soil test.

These recommendations will be listed in pounds per 1,000 square feet of surface area. Multiply the length times the width of the garden area to see how many square feet you need to cover. Doing this will help you determine how much lime or fertilizer to purchase.

You may read here and there that if your soil has a low pH, you should add lime, and if your soil has a high pH, you should add sulfur, but the pH number itself doesn’t tell the whole story. It also doesn’t give you specific information about what to add and how much, which is why the recommendations in the soil test are important.

I don’t want you to freak out, though. If you were planning on gardening without much math, you can – for the most part. If you start noticing weirdly-colored leaves or plants that aren’t producing fruit, it is possible that the problem is in the soil and it’s something that can be corrected with the right information. So, why not start with the right information and try to head off a few issues before they appear?

Once you have the soil test results, you can prepare the soil. I recommend starting by adding compost to the top of all beds where you’ll be growing edibles. Spread compost to a depth of 4-6 inches. Here’s where you have to do more math (sorry!).

To figure out how much compost to buy, multiply the length of the bed (in feet) by the width of the bed (in feet). If you have a 4×10 bed, that’s 40 square feet. Compost and mulch is, however, sold in cubic yards. To calculate the number of yards you need, follow this formula: multiply bed square feet × inches of compost depth × 0.0031. This will give you the number of cubic yards needed. For example, for 5 inches of mulch, you would need .62 cubic yards (that’s 40 square feet times 5 inches times 0.0031).

You do not have to till or dig the compost into the planting bed. The earthworms will take care of incorporating it. If you’re planting closer to the street in foodscape Zone 3 (see page 22 and next page), you can mulch just around the plants, instead of spreading it across the entire bed.

If you need to incorporate lime or fertilizer, now is the time to do it. Sprinkle it over the compost and rake it in to mix it a bit. These amendments may need to be added yearly, but also get a soil test before adding ingredients that will influence the pH reading.

Decide on Plant Placement & Spacing

When creating a new foodscape bed from scratch, remember to factor in the eventual mature size of any trees or shrubs you plant, including the shade that will be cast by the tree canopies. Because most edibles need full sun, you will likely be planting more edibles when you first install a new bed than you will 10 years down the line. If you don’t want to, or can’t, fill in all the space in your new bed at first, don’t worry. It will just look immature landscape, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Draw a simple diagram to help you determine how many plants to plant. Make a scale that correlates inches to feet and draw circles for the trees and shrubs you’re planting. The smaller circles will be the size the plant is when it goes into the ground. The larger circles will indicate the eventual size of the mature plant, including the shade of the tree canopy. To learn the expected mature sizes of trees and shrubs, read the plant tags or research the plants online (it never hurts to do a little bit of advanced planning prior to going shopping!).

Note: As you plan your new bed, be sure to review the ratio of ornamentals to edibles for each of the three foodscape zones, on page 22.

Keep these ratios in mind when planning and planting:

Foodscape Zone 3 (farthest from the house): 80% ornamentals to 20% edibles

Foodscape Zone 2 (mid-yard): 60/40 ornamentals to edibles

Foodscape Zone 1 (foundation landscape): 50/50 ornamentals to edibles

Follow These Planting Tips

Planting trees and shrubs is easy! Follow these four steps and use this image as reference.

1. Dig the planting holes for trees and shrubs so they are twice as wide as the root ball and slightly less deep.

2. Remove the plant from its containers and test the planting hole depth. If the top of the root ball is below soil grade, add some backfill to the hole, press it down, and check the depth again.

3. Fill the planting hole with the same soil you removed. Do not mix in compost or soil amendments.

4. Mulch with compost and/or shredded hardwood mulch, taking care not to make a mulch volcano around the three or shrub. You really don’t want the mulch to touch the stem or trunk.

Water daily to establish the plant, counting to ten while directing the water at the root ball of each plant. You can gradually cut back watering to every other day, every few days, once a week, and then only if there isn’t rain for two or three weeks. I’d like to give you a foolproof watering plan, but it really does depend on the weather and how fast the plant grows roots. You never want the soil to be soggy and muddy for extended periods of time, but it should not be allowed to completely dry out for the first several weeks after planting.

Finishing Up

Edging the landscape bed gives it a nice, tidy look (popular with HOAs). You absolutely do not have to cut an edge in all of the beds, and you definitely don’t have to do it every week. However, water and mulch stay nicely contained in edged beds (a heavy rain can create a mulch river if there’s no edge to catch the mulch). You can rent a power edger once a year, hire a landscaper to edge, or you can cut an edge the old-fashioned way: with a shovel. If you choose to go that route, stand facing the bed with a flat-edge shovel. Push the shovel in at an angle and cut the sod so that the edge of the landscape bed slopes toward you.

Wine bottle edge created with leftovers from my frequent dinner parties.

I like to edge my foodscape beds in the back yard with wine bottles. You can create a single row of bottles stuck into the ground or build bottle “walls.” These walls will add up to five degrees of heat to the soil during the winter, which allows me to grow heading vegetables such as broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage without cover during the colder months of the year.

After you’ve edged the beds, spread a 2-3" layer of shredded hardwood bark mulch to help retain moisture, suppress weeds, and make it “pretty.”

Once the foodscape framework is planted, you’re ready for the fun part: adding edibles!