beyond the raised bed garden: integrating edible plants into your landscape

Feb 9

When we design, we think of the many different ways people can connect with their landscapes, and taste can also be such a fun sense to work with. Designing a landscape that more strategically and carefully incorporates edible plants can give us an abundance of food and move us beyond the raised bed veggie garden.

Often we think that edible plants have to remain separate from the rest of our landscapes, relegated to raised planter boxes and replanted seasonally. Growing tomatoes, lettuce, chard and beans can be so rewarding but also fairly labor intensive and empty beds look drab in the off season. In addition to growing all these annual goodies, perennial edibles can be part of your general planting design, mixed in with ornamental shrubs, vines and ground covers, waiting to be discovered as you meander through your garden. Perennial nuts, berries and fruits will come back every year without the need to sow seeds each season and can provide incredible flowers, fall color and textures in the landscape.

Foraging in your home garden is a profound way to connect with your land and to become more in tune with the seasons and the microclimates in your yard. And in a few years, when you have more food than you know what to do with, you’ll also get to know your neighbors as you distribute your abundance of apples or cherries to those lucky enough to live close by.

Every plant in this side garden is edible. Strawberries, thyme, oregano and rosemary provide evergreen structure and vining grapes and berry canes provide height, spring and summer foliage and fall color.

Designing with Edible Plants

The Pacific Northwest is one of the best places for growing perennial fruiting plants and there are tons to choose from. Below is a taste of our favorites, categorized by plant structure, and how to incorporate them into your garden design:

Ground Covers: LOW GROWERS THAT SPREAD

Strawberries: Instead of, or in addition to, non-fruiting ground covers like Arctostaphylos uva-ursi, try a native or commercial strawberry variety. Fragaria vesca or Fragaria chiloensis are natives that do well in part shade. Mix these in with ferns and hellebores in a shady understory garden. There are many local commercial varieties like Hood that will give you an abundance of berries in sunny locations and leaf coverage in the winter. Strawberries look great planted in the crevices between decorative boulders, too.

Thyme: Instead of a low growing Ceanothus in areas with lots of sun and little water, try Thymus serpyllum or Lemon Thyme. These evergeen herbs are incredibly aromatic, give a profusion of summer flowers and work well between flagstone pavers. Plant on the edges of a walkway or intermixed with ornamental grasses, echinacea, sages and agastache.

SHRUBS AND GRASSES: mid-level height and texture

Blueberries: The fall color on these babies is just stunning! There are many varieties to choose from each spring at Portland Nursery. Pop them in between evergreen shrubs like Cistus or Arctostaphylos or next to sun-tolerant Hydrangeas or Dogwoods. Blueberries can get quite large and can be kept pruned in pots on a sunny patio. If you’ve got a shadier spot in need of an edible shrub about 4’x4’, we’ve got a native Vaccinium ovatum, or Evergreen Huckleberry, that produces delicious small wild berries that taste very much like a commercial blueberry. Plant these in a shady corner or along a fence line for a beautiful edible low hedge or foundation planting.

Sage, Oregano and Rosemary: These herbs are wonderful to mix into a mediterranean garden plan palette. Rosemarinus ‘Arp’ is the rosemary best suited for our cold and wet winters. It makes a stunning, fragrant invitation when planted on either side of a walkway, at a patio entrance or flanking an arbor. Sage and Oregano stay a bit smaller but still provide a fragrant leaf with silvery blue color. Mix these in a sunny drought tolerant landscape amongst softer grasses like Pennisetum or Muhlenbergia and other silver hued plants like Hebe ‘Quicksliver’.

Pineapple Guava: Nothing tastes or smells better than a pineapple guava! Ooooh these are a special fruit with a tropical scent and flavor but hardy enough to work in Portland. Some Acca sellowiana are large enough to work as a small tree placed carefully next to a patio and some small enough to use as an evergreen structural shrub in a mixed planting area. They have a silvery leaf and work well in a scrubby, grassy landscape.

Lemongrass: For a different texture, plant some Lemongrass in front of mid-size shrubs and peppered in with soft groundcovers and perennial flowers. Plant among other species with tropical foliage like hardy ginger or fatsia. It can stand a light frost, and we’ve seen it come back year after year in Portland, but may need protection in harsh winters.

Vines and Canes

Instead of a clematis, honeysuckle or wisteria, try these vines for edible fruits. They can be grown vertically for a shade wall, over an arbor or overhead on a pergola to provide shelter. And try berry canes as a low hedge between different areas of your garden or as a perennial foundation in front of a fence.

Grapes: Grapes grow vigorously in the Pacific Northwest in a warm sunny area. Canes can grow 20 feet in a season! We love a seedless Black Monukka or Thomcord but there are plenty of others to choose from.

Raspberries and Marionberries: Don’t let the Himalayan Blackberry give all berry canes a bad rap! Cane fruit grows incredible well here and there are lots of varieties that won’t take over the city! We absolutely love a thornless raspberry if you’ve got kids (and even if you don’t) as well as an everbearing variety that will give you two crops a year. Marionberries offer a more intense and unique flavor.

Passion Fruit: Many Passion Fruit (Passiflora) vines are cold hardy enough to grow in the PNW, but the reliable ones are not the fruiting kind. They do, however, have some spectacular blooms. There are a few varieties that will fruit in our climate and they are well worth giving them a try! They are cold hardy to 20 degrees so they’ll need to be planted in a pot or a very warm pocket of the garden, and they’ll need some frost protection in the winter, but the fruit will be worth the labor. A favorite is the Frederick.

Kiwi: Kiwis are great cold hardy fruits you can grow over an arbor or pergola. They offer beautiful dense leaf coverage when that summer sun is blazing :) Find the right variety here.

Trees

We live in the perfect spot for growing so many incredible fruit trees: cherries, apples, pears and persimmons love it here, as do many varieties of figs, plums, asian pears, pawpaws, mulberries and Arbequina olives. Opt for semi-dwarf rootstock so that your trees remain an easily managed and harvested size. Choose locations in as much sun as possible and don’t add much to your native soil when planting. Just give the trees a nice layer of mulch in the winter and wait patiently for your harvest! There is more great info at Portland Nursery and we love purchasing bear root trees from One Green World.