Living Homegrown Podcast – Episode 42 Foodscaping

Show Notes: www.LivingHomegrown.com/42

This is the Living Homegrown Podcast, episode #42.

Announcer: Welcome to the Living Homegrown Podcast, where it’s all about how to live farm fresh, without the farm. To help guide the way to a more flavorful and sustainable lifestyle is your host, national PBS TV producer and canning expert Theresa Loe.

Theresa: Hey there everybody and welcome to episode #42 of the Living Homegrown podcast. I’m your host Theresa Loe and this is the podcast where we talk about living farm fresh without the farm. And that’s through artisan food crafts like canning and fermenting, growing your own organic food and just living a more sustainable lifestyle. If you'd like to learn more about any of these topics or my online canning courses just visit my website LivingHomegrown.com.

Today's episode is about small space food growing. Now that’s whether you are in the city or in the suburbs or you already have some sort of very small backyard. I'm going to talk today about how you can still have a beautiful landscape in that small space while incorporating edibles. I have another episode coming up that is more on container gardening if you have no space, but today's episode is if you just have a small space. And I thought it would be a really good topic to hit on here in February because so many people are just gearing up and ready to tackle springtime. And you're starting to plan your garden or maybe if you're in California or you're already gardening like we are out here or you're still buried deep in snow but you're dreaming a lot. So I'm hoping that today's episode will kind of help you get all geared up for spring and you can start thinking of some of these new ways to incorporate edibles into your landscape.

You know my entire business with Living Homegrown is about helping people live farm fresh without the farm, that’s my motto or my tagline. And that means capitalizing on those seasonal flavors whether we get it locally or we grow it ourselves. And also preserving and food crafting that flavor and exploring ways that we can produce our own food no matter how small the space. That's kind of been my mission with Living Homegrown. So it's that last part that we're going to be talking about today.

And most people think when they think of food growing they think of planting rows of vegetables or boring rows of whatever. And nothing could be further from the truth because you can really grow a lot of edible plants in a really breathtaking way. And to illustrate that I'm going to talk to you about how I've been growing food here in my space for over 20 years in a little tiny one tenth of an acre plot in Los Angeles.

And I have never planted rows of anything here. Everything is grown more as a landscape plant and I'll explain that as we go. But it just never felt right to me to grow in rows. First of all this isn’t farm land it was my home garden which when we we purchased it it was just a big weed backyard. There was nothing here and I always wanted it to feel beautiful as well as productive. And even though my space was small I didn't really feel that rows and rows of food would really make me want to go out there and spend time.

I still wanted to be able to enjoy the beauty of gardening as well as the productive side of gardening. So I immediately when I first started this landscape years and years ago I started with the whole different mindset. And the other thing is that a lot of people think that because they don't have a lot of space that they can't grow food and they have this image in their head but they need to plant rows of vegetables to be productive. And although there's really nothing wrong with rows of vegetables don't get me wrong if that's the way you like to grow your veggies it's totally cool. But I just don't think it lends itself to a home landscape when we have oddly shaped planting areas. Unless you actually rip everything out and make squares to plant in. I didn't have squares. I wanted to keep my landscape beds so I kind of changed it up and adapted my planting to landscape beds rather than create rows or boxes in my backyard.

So in this episode I kind of challenge you to think of your edible plants in the same way that you might think of your other landscape plants. Now like I said I've always done this from the minute we bought this property. I just really felt I had some specific goals in mind with our edible plantings. Because we had a really small space I felt I had to pack a lot in and I had to garden very efficiently. Meaning that I had to really look at my space and use every nook and cranny trying to make sure that if I had space where I could grow up I grew up, I grew vertically and then I would plant other things underneath that so that I took care of the space underneath the vertical planting. And I really tried to be as efficient in my small space as possible.

But I also wanted to have a beautiful garden. So I treated all my vegetables as landscape plants and I would grow them as part of the landscape and not as a row. I got my gardening style really because I absolutely adore British cottage gardens. And when I was in school starting to study horticulture I was really looking at how people landscape for cottage gardening and just adapted that to my vegetable gardening. The whole idea of edible landscaping is nothing new. This is not anything that I invented or really anyone invented. It's been around for a long time.

There’s a new buzz word for it now called foodscaping but it's really edible landscaping that's been around for decades. And people like Ros Creasy who you may know from all of her wonderful books or the articles that she's written she's been doing this for decades and writing about it beautifully for decades. And she's kind of the queen of edible landscaping and she does it beautifully. I will be sure to link in the show notes of this episode to some of her books and some information about her. We did a whole episode on Ros Creasy for Growing a Greener World on PBS and I'll be sure to link to that episode. You know all of our PBS episodes once they air nationally on PBS we then put them on our website so that you can watch it and return back to it anytime you want. So even if you don't have PBS or you don't have our particular show I will link to this actual episode on Ros and you can watch it in its entirety whenever you want. So I'll be sure to link to that and the show notes. The show notes will be at LivingHomegrown.com/42. Just go there and I'll have everything there for you.

I will also linked to an episode we did in season one of our show on my backyard. Now this was filmed gosh probably almost 7 years ago! So at the time I was the associate producer of the show and my kids are very little but it will give you an idea of what my backyard looked like at the time. My backyard actually looks a little bit differently now. At the time that we filmed that I had a miniature train garden running through the center of my vegetable garden. We’ve since taken that out and we now use that center area as more planting space for edibles. But at the time I had an entire train garden my boys were very little and they actually loved it. We had a really good time with it for a long time. We had a G scale train garden back there. But I have a link to that episode if you'd like to kind of get a look at what my backyard looks like or looked like at the time. And you can watch that as well.

Now what I do really want you guys to get from this episode today is to kind of think differently. Think differently with your edibles. And the trick is to think of edible plants in terms of color, texture and form. And when you do that it’s like this whole new world gardening possibilities pop up. And you can really transform your landscape and spark this whole new love for producing food that's not boring and not feeling like you're trying to make your backyard feel like farmland.

Now when I’ve had sections of my yard in full production my garden looks more like a cottage garden landscape and it's kind of surprising to people when they walk up closely to it and they realize that 90% of that landscape is completely edible. So you can make things look beautiful without making it look like it's edibles. And this is especially important if you're thinking about ripping out your front lawn or starting to plant more edibles in your front yard. A lot of people worry that oh man I'm going to be planting these rows of vegetables and my neighbors will hate the way it looks. And you can be very strategic and plant just maybe partially edibles and partially perennials. And just by mixing those edibles into an existing landscape no one will be the wiser to the fact that you're actually growing a productive, edible landscape right there in front of all the neighbors and everybody. They may not even know! So you don't have to worry about that.

Now when I was in college we were taught the basic landscaping design principles. And that those design principles will hold true whether you have a large landscape or a small landscape. So when we were looking at a smaller scale garden like my little tiny one tenth of an acre we would just shrink the scale but follow some of the same solid design principles used in larger landscapes.

And that was when a light bulb went off in my head. And I started thinking of edibles like they weren't edibles at all. And so there's many design principles that you can utilize for anything that you want to plant that happens to be an edible. And so the first thing you do when you're looking at different plants to grow and add to your landscape is to consider the color, texture and form of that plant.

So you look at the plant as it's going to be maturing in your garden and you say to yourself you know is this a bright green like butterhead lettuce? Or is it more of a burgundy color like red velvet lettuce? Are the leaves tall and spiky like chives? Or are they rounded like spinach? Is it a kind of a plant that wants to draw you in and makes you touch the leaves like sage? Or does it make you feel like you want to be kept back like artichoke?

You see what I mean — each plant kind of has their own little characteristics or personality. So as you're looking at different plants you want to take note of those personalities or traits and you're going to use those traits to create drama and your landscape. And there's kind of three ways that you can create drama. The first way and really the easiest way probably the thing that I use more than anything else is to have echo in your landscape. So when you're looking at a particular flower bed and you're trying to plant that if you echo a color or a texture within that landscaped it makes it all come together. So one of the easiest ways to do this is just to pick a few colors and repeat them throughout the landscape. So you can use the same plant in several places or different plants that have the same exact color.

Like you could have purple cabbage in a couple spots and then maybe a purple flowered basil in a couple spots and just having that one color repeated through the whole bed just ties it all together. It's one of the easiest and simplest ways to make a flower bed look landscaped rather than a mosh posh of different things. And it is very classic way to do cottage British cottage gardening is to have an echo of color.

If you look at any of the British magazines or in any kind of you go to Pinterest and look at British cottage gardens you'll notice that there'll be a repeat of color in each flower bed. Maybe they have pink roses and they have something else over here that is also pink that's flowering and when you look step back and look at the whole landscape that pink is dotted through the whole thing and that's what pulls it all together.

So take note of that because it’s really easy thing to do. Another way to add drama to your landscape is to have contrast. So you place contrasting textures and shapes next to each other and that adds interest. But it also keeps the plants from blending together. And if you do this it creates like a drama or a spotlight on each plant grouping so that it stands out and is allowed to shine.

If you were to take all the plants that have maybe the same shape and color, they're all about the same size they all look about the same, you plant them together, it's just one big mass when you step back and just looks like a big mesh of all one plant even though they're different. But if you always make sure that you're planting things that are a little bit different from each other maybe the shades of green are different, you have spiky plants next to something that has rounded leaves, you have something that's fuzzy next to something spiky or you have something that has gray leaves vs something that's more chartreuse. You have that there and when you step back you can see each individual planting. And they don't mesh together and each plant is allowed to have its own little drama or spotlight.

The third way to add drama to your landscape is with size. So this is just a standard landscaping principle no matter what you're planting whether you're planting edibles or not. But you always wanted to have the taller plants towards the back and the smaller plants towards the front. But this is especially important with edibles because you never want to be shading the smaller plants. You have to look at when you're placing your plants that you're not going to have something really, really tall that just kind of smothers or shades out the smaller plants.

So if you keep all your taller plants towards the back it also allows you to see everything coming forward. So you put tall in the back, middle sized in the middle and the smaller little tiny plants towards the front. And that's pretty typical in any kind of landscaping. But the main way that I achieved my British cottage garden look with my edibles is that I plant in drifts. And a drift is just the opposite of a row. So you're planting in groupings of plans usually laid out in like an odd or a random pattern rather than planting everything in a row.

And it's kind of like the way you would plant bulbs, like tulips. If you were planting tulips I doubt very seriously that you would plant rows of tulips unless you were trying to be very, very productive on a farm. Instead what you would do if you would take those tulips and you would plant them in groupings or little patches in your garden so that when they came up they would look very natural. Well you do the same thing with all your edibles.

You just place the plants randomly within an imaginary drift area so that they look as if they grew their naturally rather than in straight rows. Now we're talking small scale here so if you're planting medium sized plants let's say in a smaller garden you might have a drift of only three plants. We’re not talking to 7 to 9 of the same thing. You might only have one two three plants there. And if its a larger plant alike an artichoke well in a small landscape like mine I would probably only have one to have some dramatic interest but I wouldn't have 3, 5 or 9 artichokes in my backyard.

So as you're starting to think about your garden just make sure that you kind of think of groupings of plants and you would plant things in drifts. And if you're repeating those drifts you might have two or three drifts within one little area so that that same color and texture is repeated throughout.

So in other words let's say you're planting carrots. You might plant a drift of carrots here and a drift of carrots there and when they come up will have the echo that's happening and you have the repeat of that texture all throughout that little area of your flowerbed. And it helps tie it all together.

Another way that I get a pretty landscape while also being productive is that I over plant a lot and I harvest baby vegetables. So I started doing this when my boys are really little and they were so excited when they would help me plant anything. They loved planting the seeds and watching them grow but they said they were so excited they so impatient waiting for something to come up and they just couldn't wait to pull it out and see what it was. Especially if it's something like carrots where it's underground and they can't really see what's happening so it was just killing them to have to wait! So I would over plant those sections so that they could harvest baby vegetables without sacrificing the entire crop. And I soon realized that by consciously over planting and then later thinning that out and using those to eat I was doubling the use of that one small space.

Now this is a little bit different than regular thinning where you're just pulling out the extra plants while they're still shoots. I would let these plants grow into baby produce size so that they were just small carrots or small radishes and then I would thin them out. So I wasn't just thinning out little tiny seedlings like most people do I was letting them get a little bit larger so that they were baby sized vegetables. And when you do this you get things like tender baby carrots, you get tender spring onions, baby spinach. Now I would I would pull the broccoli sprouts and I would use those in salads but things like that. It was a great way for me to get a little bit more production out of a very small space. Now of course there were times when I would over plant and then forget about it and I would come help later and I've got overcrowded vegetables that weren't doing very well. So that happens. It always happens. But for the most part I was able to keep up with it pretty well and get double production from that one spot. You know occasionally I'm traveling a lot for the PBS show and things get out of hand and I come back and it’s like you uhhh you know everything everythings all crunched up and I'm trying to thin it out. If you try to keep up on like a section of carrots or radishes and keep up on it pretty well you can get quite a lot of production from that one space.

Another way that I get a lot of beauty into my edible garden is with flowers. always kind of felt like flowers were my secret weapon for landscape design because they just had the pop of color to an otherwise all green landscape. And they have the added benefit of drawing in all the pollinators to my vegetables. So it's a total win win situation. And you can get the beauty and the pollinators at the same time. If you be sure to include edible flowers into your edible landscape then it's even a triple win because you'll get the color of things like nasturtiums and roses and yes roses are edible and you'll get that as well as something you can add to your salads and desserts so it's a great way to go.

I kind of think of flowers and a couple different ways. First of all I think of them as exclamation marks like I might add a really bright yellow or bright and red into a flower bed so it kind of adds some pop of color. But you can also use them to add those echoes of color like add a complementary color. If you have purple cabbage then add some purple flowers or something that has a shade of blue to pull out the blue in the cabbage. So by doing that you can use the flowers as a complimentary echo. Or you can just use them as kind of the glue that ties the whole flower bed together by just using them as a repeat. Maybe you have all different kinds of vegetables that you're growing in this one section but if you have the same flower repeated through the whole thing it gives you a way of tying everything together. I have in my garden a lot of trailing nasturtiums. I have them in all of my flower beds so that when they're trailing and weaving out of the different plants as you step back and look you can see nasturtiums through the entire garden and it just pulls it all together. Plus I love to eat nasturtium and my chickens love nasturtiums so I grow a lot of nasturtiums and they are just so very prolific so I'm always ripping out the extras. I like the way they look as they kind of trail onto my garden paths and take away the hard edges of my flower beds. I really love the way that looks.

So the thing is with this type of gardening is it’s not all super easy. There is one thing that is kind of tricky with growing edibles mixed into the landscape and that's crop rotation. If you grow food you know crop rotation is really important because if you grow the same food in the same place year after year like if you grow corn in the same place every year after year eventually that corn is always going to be depleting the soil of the same nutrients year after year.

And after bit of time you can start having problems with your corn in that spot because the plants are not getting their full regime of nutrients and so the plants can start having bug problems and disease problems. And so one of the tricks that the food gardeners do is we rotate are crops so that one year you might have corn and the next year you're planting all spinach. You know you always are rotating them so you’re never planting the same thing like you're not planting different kinds of beans over and over and over to the same spot. You want to rotate your crops and that way different plants are playing different nutrients and some plants actually put back nutrients into the soil. And it's also important this is one of the reasons why we compost, we are always adding things back to the soil of what we pull out. But crop rotation is very tricky when you are growing in the way I grow where the plants are more mixed into the landscape or grown as cottage plants. Very easy to do crop rotation when you have a row of something here and a row of something there and then the next year you just shift. But when its all mixed in it's a little tricky to remember okay, did I have corn here last time I did I have cabbage? Because it's all kind of a mishmash. So the way I get around this is I just have to pay really close attention. Now it's not like I'm talking about acres of property here it's one tenth of an acre. It’s a very small backyard by a lot of people standards and I just really pay attention to what I planted and I make sure that I take note of the certain crops and I probably don't get it exactly right every year but I definitely completely change my garden every year so that I have as much crop rotation as possible.

And that's kind of the other downside of this type of vegetable growing is that although I have some foundational plantings of some perennials like my apple trees or herbs, a big portion of my garden consists of annual plants and that means that I completely ripped out and replant most of my yard every year. So it's a very big job and sometimes I do wish that I had something that was a little less labor-intensive sometimes when I'm traveling a lot and it happens to be at the time that I'm supposed to be planting my next year's crops.

But I also feel like I get so much out of my garden both in enjoyment and and flavor that it's totally worth it. Now I have slowly added a lot more perennial edibles into my landscape because you get multiple crops from them and they actually look beautiful in the garden. So I do feel like I have a lot less to rip out every year and that really helps and I also grow a lot of edibles in containers so that when I rip out a certain area if I don't have time to replant it I just set some of my containers in that spot so that I still have some beauty and my garden doesn't have this big gaping hole in the back yard. Because I walk through my garden every single day. I enjoy my garden as much as I can so it's not just a production garden for me it's also just part of where I spend my day. Its part of my sanctuary, it's part of my life style. So I want to have it look beautiful as well as productive.

And I also find it when it's the middle of summer and everything is just popping with color and the bees are buzzing and I'm walking through there and I pull like an Amish paste tomato off of the vine and smell its warm fragrances and go oh man I can't wait to make something with this, all those frustrations of having to start over in spring time are just completely gone because there's so many months of joy that I get from this garden.

So I hope they that by hearing kind of how I approach my edible gardening it will give you some ideas for how maybe you can incorporate edibles into your own landscape. You don't have to rip everything out and plant rows and rows and rows, you can just take a little sections of what you already have and add edibles to it. And maybe create your own beautiful edible landscape as well.

If you would like to see actual photographs of how I've done this I'm going to have all of that in the show notes of this episode and I'm also going to have a PDF for you of some of the plants that I use for small space growing. There's certain things that I grow year after year because they're small compact plants that really produce a lot. And you can get them as seeds really inexpensively and we're right at the time of your right now where it’s the perfect time of year for you to get the seeds to start your own garden.

So I'm going to have in the show notes a listing of some of my favorite seeds for small space growing as well as some very reliable seed sources that also have some selections of some of the more hard to find seeds. So I will have all of that and the show notes for this episode and you can download that PDF and print it out and use it whenever you're ready to tackle your spring garden.

So to get that just go to LivingHomegrown.com/42 and that will take you to the show notes with this episode, you can see the photos of my garden, you can watch some of the videos of Growing a Greener World episodes on edible landscaping. And I think that you get you all inspired and get you well on your way to your own productive garden.

Thank you so much for joining me today I am really honored that you took time out of your busy day to listen to this podcast. If you'd like to see me next week we're going to be tackling even more fun topics so until then I hope you can work towards living a little bit more local, seasonal and home grown. See you next time! Take care.

Announcer: That’s all for this episode of the Living Homegrown podcast. Visit LivingHomegrown.com to download Theresa’s free canning resource guide and find more tips on how to live farm fresh, without the farm. Be sure to join Theresa Loe next time on the Living Homegrown podcast.