5 Edible Plants You Can Put In Your Garden Landscape
If you’re planning on taking up a little bit of gardening and landscaping in your backyard, why not integrate a couple of edible plants with those ornamental pieces? Enter edible landscaping, or what others call “foodscaping.” This is an excellent way of creating a stunning garden in your backyard while enjoying the benefits of having some edible fruits, vegetables, and root crops you can use for cooking. Here are some edible landscape plants you can use for your garden.
Beans
Nobody wants a barren-looking landscape with just a few plans lying around. If you need to fill out an area quickly and add some height to your landscape, putting some beans would be the best option for you. Beans are quite capable of growing rapidly to cover a trellis with some beautiful heart-shaped leaves. Some varieties even have some flowers that are edible too.
Blueberries
Who doesn’t love eating blueberries, right? They’re quite tasty and are packed with antioxidants. These nutritious berries can also be used for making smoothies, desserts, fruit salads, and just about any food or beverage you can think of. You can go for highbush blueberries that grow up to six feet tall and can produce larger berries. Lowbush berries are also an amazing option with extremely hard but flavorful berries.
Asparagus
To the asparagus-lovers out there, you can finally have your own supply of asparagus in your own backyard. A patch of this delicious green vegetable can be productive for up to 30 years, with little care. Having some home-grown asparagus is perfect whenever you’re making salad or pasta dishes.
Just remember that it takes some time for the asparagus to grow and be useful. Avoid picking or cutting them for the first two years. Those first spears actually break into leaves and help sequester energy through photosynthesis. This eventually builds up the roots of the existing plants, helping them to produce more roots and shoots. Come year three, you can go crazy when harvesting and allow the last shoots to mature through the season.
Sweetberry Honeysuckle
This member of the Honeysuckle genus, also called “Honeyberry” or “Haskap,” bears large purple tart berries that are good for fresh eating. This particular plant is gaining some popularity in North America because of its appearance and flavour. They look a lot like an oversized, elongated blueberry. Honeyberries are shrub-like plants that can grow up to four feet in height.
Saskatoon Berries
Saskatoons grow most often as tall bushes sprouting pale green leaves on woody, reddish-brown stems. With the right conditions, Saskatoons can actually reach 15 feet in height and often gravitate to thickets, fence lines, and hedgerows as long as their soil is well-drained and plentiful. They possess edible berries and delicate white flowers. These berries are highly prized by birds, so make sure you take a closer look at them, especially when it’s harvest time.
Conclusion
The idea of creating an edible landscape is very appealing. If you want to make one for your backyard, you have to pick the right type of plant to put there. This list gives you some garden ideas of shrubs, fruit trees, and flowers you can plant that thrive in the Canadian climate.
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