Good Taste!

You don’t have to be a Green Giant to grow your own small foothold in the eco-friendly trend of eating locally. Plants that add flavor in the kitchen can add to the landscape too. You don’t need to plow a rectangle in your back yard (or front yard, as more and more seem to be doing) to incorporate a harvest into your design.
The first thing everyone thinks of is tomatoes — the hardest vegetables to grow well. Water-hungry and disease and pest prone, tomatoes convince many would-be gardeners to throw in the trowel. But because nothing beats the taste of home-grown tomatoes, improve your odds with wise choices at planting time. Select disease- resistant varieties and varieties you can grow in containers.

But don’t stop there. Edible shrubs and groundcovers add flavor and beauty with less fuss. Blueberries incorporate easily into the landscape, offering spring blooms and colorful fall foliage in addition to the tasty berries. All you need are mulch and water to keep blueberries happy. It is best to have three shrubs and two different varieties for cross-pollination. Blueberries are natives and a great plant for a sunny woodland edge or the back of a border. Just make sure you design a way to get back there to harvest.

Blueberries do best in a thick bed of mulch, but even this “empty” space can add to the kitchen table with a note of color. I surround my blueberries with daffodil bulbs, giving me weeks of fresh flowers each spring. By the time I need to walk around the shrubs to harvest berries, the daffodils are dormant under the mulch. Space between newly planted or slow-growing shrubs is ideal for squash vines, which add bright yellow blooms and fruits while choking out competing weeds.

Strawberries are a useful groundcover, but take more weeding and work. Choose non-running strawberries so the plants stay where you want them.
Thornless blackberries and raspberries are very easy to grow, but a little more difficult to incorporate into a tidy design.
Native muscadines are also easy to grow. Pruning is the principle maintenance task for these plants. I train my blackberries and muscadines on wire strung between fenceposts. Muscadines also do well on a sturdy arbor.
Don’t forget your sideyard. It may have enough sun for a raised vegetable garden.

Herbs are the easiest way to add fresh flavor to your cooking and most herbs are deer resistant. Prostrate or creeping rosemary and the many types of oregano (including golden oregano) are very attractive evergreen groundcovers. Sage, fennel and other upright herbs are easy to incorporate into a border. Basil, by far one of the best flavors in the garden, adds bright green annual foliage to container plantings in warm weather, easily replaced by parsley and colorful lettuce in cool months. Fresh mint is great for teas and garnish, but keep your mint in a container that is on top of concrete or you will spend years cursing it as you try to remove this rampant grower from your planting beds, yard, driveway.

Be careful not to spray chemicals near your food crops. Start thinking now about where to incorporate edibles into your landscape, but wait until April or May to plant tomatoes and basil. You can get muscadines, berries and herbs into the ground anytime. Planting them now gives them a chance to establish root systems before the stress of summer heat.
Within a few months and for years to come a fresh harvest can be as close as your own back yard.