Edible gardens have become a highly desirable element of outdoor home design thanks to the rising popularity of homesteading influencers on social media. These media figures show off quick, idealized snippets of the work that goes into growing, harvesting, and processing the products of their gardens.
While creating an edible garden can be a rewarding experience and provide bountiful rewards of fruit and home-grown veggies, they can bring their own set of problems to your home. To determine whether or not the farmer’s life is for you, you must understand each element of the edible garden, what they can provide for you and the surprising costs involved.
Elements Of An Edible Garden
Vegetable Beds
Veggie beds have been a staple of the homeowner’s diet since ancient times. While they have fallen out of favor since the rise of the supermarket, they can still provide a welcome supplement of healthy greens to your diet.
Contemporary vegetable gardens are usually grown in raised beds constructed to provide a focal point in the landscape. Thanks to their unique nutritional needs, most types of vegetables require special soil conditions to grow successfully.
This means your landscape will require regular maintenance if you want your greens to grow more than once. You can also experiment with crop rotation, which is a system of growing alternating edible plants that each provide their own necessary nutrients to the soil.
Fruit Trees
Fruit trees are the most popular form of edible plants in residential gardens. Under the right conditions, fruit trees can provide far more fruit than you can hope to eat by yourself, requiring preservation or being given to friends and family as a gift.
The type of fruit trees that thrive in your garden largely depends on your area’s climate, but many of the most common can grow in southern California. For example, San Diego residents can expect citrus, avocado, fig, loquat, Persimmon, Pomegranate, stone fruit, warm climate apples, and guava. At the same time, they may find raising tropical or frost-dependent trees more difficult.
Maintaining a fruit tree is more hands-off than maintaining a vegetable garden, as fruit trees’ life spans are measured in years or decades rather than months. However, they still require consistent care and maintenance to stay healthy and produce a yearly harvest.
Specialty Plants
Many people enjoy using their landscape to create visual flair for their homes. Edible plants can be used just like any other to create a unique aesthetic for your outdoor space.
Specialty growing methods allow professional landscape contractors to shift the plants’ natural growing patterns to create a more interesting visual. Often, this involves using hardscape features like trellises to guide the plant as it matures.
Some of these methods include the espalier method, which forces the plant to grow on a two-dimensional plane and create a cross-section of the tree. Torrey Pines Landscape Company has also used trellises to grow passion fruit vines, creating a beautiful feature that provides delicious tropical fruit.
Are Edible Gardens Right For Me?
Edible gardens can add a unique focal point to your landscape, provide a relaxing outdoor hobby, and provide a healthy addition to your diet for you and your loved ones. As the previous sections hinted at, however, there are costs incurred by adding them to your home.
Edible gardens add a significant amount of maintenance work to the landscape. Once they ripen and are harvested, vegetables will need to be removed and replanted. Specialty plants will need to be consistently pruned and reworked for proper guidance. Fruit trees are especially vulnerable to disease and need consistent care to stay healthy.
One of the biggest potential issues homeowners will face with an edible garden is the attraction of pests, such as insects and animals. Beetles, worms, flies, gnats, mice, rats, squirrels, raccoons, and even coyotes are all attracted to the alluring presence of food growing on your property.
Proper growing methods, landscape design, and maintenance can significantly lessen the probability of a pest problem developing. However, this will often require the expertise of specialists – expertise that Torrey Pines Landscape would be happy to provide!
If you have dreamed of creating an edible garden to call your own but never knew where to start, Torrey Pines Landscape will design and build the perfect southern California garden. Call today!