Wanted:Seeds to populate my back yard with edibles
Marcus Fleming
6 years ago
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Pea
6 years agoRelated Discussions
My edible landscape garden
Comments (5)Hey Charlie, Your garden sounds pretty cool. I have been working on my own edible landscape as well and I do have a couple of suggestions. For your areas with part sun, consider service berries (aka Saskatoon berries or June berries). Also, although you are growing raspberries, I would definitely have a triple crown thornless blackberry bush. Both the service berries and black berries are very easy to grow and taste great. Another plant to consider is the currant bush. I think the berries are delicious although not everyone likes the taste. This plant will tolerate shade and like the others is easy to grow. Any decent garden should also have a walking path, a water feature, wind chimes and ornamentation, and a place to sit. If you include these things, I think you will enjoy your garden a great deal more. Finally, I agree with Aunty Kitchen. You need to share some photos even if it is winter. Good luck!...See MoreEdible landscape in the front yard - pollution a concern?
Comments (3)The first question is how old is the neighborhood? Was this a neighborhood built around 1910, or 1950, or 1970? The reason I ask is that this defines the number of decades the near-street area was accumulating residues of leaded gas before it was banned, and how long other pollutants were accumulating before today's much cleaner cars. In terms of the safety of eating the fruit, the trees should be no problem. They should sequester minerals and toxins in the heartwood of the trunk, and the chance of problems with the fruit are slim to none. The berries are potentially more of a problem.... If this is a post-1970 neighborhood, I wouldn't worry about it. If it is an older neighborhood, I think you're smart to be concerned, but you have a couple of options. Berries are generally not very deeply or widely rooted, compared to some other kinds of plants. And it sounds like you are looking at more discrete and controlled berry plants, rather than something that spreads wildly. You could use some sort of raised bed approach, of course, with new soil. Or you could figure out where the berries will be, take out the soil down at least a foot, and at least three feet out beyond the stems of the berry you plant, and then fill with soil from elsewhere. If you go this route, it would be easier to put the berries near each other in one area. Less shoveling.... With either approach, I would gladly come eat berries at your house anytime (grins)....See MoreReplacing all front-yard landscaping with edibles in SE Va.
Comments (7)I'm in the process of gradually doing the same thing in my Northern VA front yard. Your ideas sound like an excellent start. There is a very good Edible Landscaping nursery in Afton, VA near Charlottesville - not too close to you, but likely a reasonably day trip. They are at http://www.ediblelandscapin.com - they do mail order, but if you go yourself you can hand select your plants, save on shipping, and draw on the extensive knowledge of the owner (at least during the week). For fruit trees it depends on what you like to eat the most. Most varieties are available on dwarf root stock, which you should be able to space 8-10' apart. I planted Lingonberry and Wintergreen between my blueberry bushes - they grow slowly, but make pretty groundcover year round, happy in some shade as an understory plant, and are edible, too! I'm also interested in trying some wild ginger, which is native, though I don't have it yet. You can get bush cherries, and bush varieties of filberts (non-native), both grow into fairly large shrubs. Artichokes die back in the winter, but are very attractive in the warmer months, and are perennials you can grow from seed. There are also hardy kiwis which grow on thick, sturdy vines (similar to wisteria, but they don't grab on as aggressively). They take a fair bit of space, heavy pruning, and at least 1 male plant to pollinate up to 5-6 females. I prefer their small, smooth-skinned fruits over the hairy ones in the grocery stores. They fruit prolifically, and yield kiwis the size of large grapes - you can just pop them in your mouth without peeling! So far in my yard I have Sunshine Blue blueberries (tolerate less acidic soil than most blueberries), Hosui Asian pear, a non-astringent Asian persimmon (Shenko?), a contorted filbert, and a bush filbert (don't recall the variety) in my front yard. I will add another small tree (Asian pear or sour cherry, I think), and a pair of hardy kiwi. I'll also start new Artichokes - I let the ones I planted in 2007 get overgrown with grass, and they didn't survive last winter. Sorry for the lengthy post - I hope it helps a bit! Enjoy your project. -Leah...See MoreWhat plastic eating monster is in my back yard?
Comments (21)Update on my own roof rat control efforts. I have successfully used snap traps tied to branches in my fig tree, using the plan outlined on this U. of Florida extension website: https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/uw120. A key idea is to activate the traps at dusk and disable them at dawn in order to avoid by-catch of other animals and birds (it also helps here that the traps are in a tree with nothing in it that would attract other animals, like possums). In two nights I have caught 3 rats (including a humungous, mature male and two young females). My neighbors (the new, responsible ones replacing the hoarders who had exacerbated the rat situation), seeing my success, have also started trapping. This is clearly a good time to do so: the rats are apparently desperate right now, with no fruit currently readily available and so desperate that they had, earlier this week, actually begun to eat the bark on my fig tree, girdling one branch completely, having already eaten all the terminal buds and baby figs on the tree. With luck, we can knock these populations back down and have some peace again on this front. Unlike the scare statistics put forth by professional exterminators, roof rat populations are not infinite -- they just seem to be -- and can be controlled (Norway rats, now, are another thing entirely...)....See MoreMarcus Fleming
6 years ago
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(Jay/Jax FL/Zone 9a)