My Edible Landscape

I’ve been quite remiss and lazy in my posting since the summer turned hot. In fact, I’ve been lazy with just about everything. During spring, the garden is the excuse to get outside into the fresh air and do something productive. But after several months of seeding, re-potting, shoveling, raking, hauling and blogging, one needs to slow down a bit. This is the time of year when I sit back and enjoy my garden as the beautiful, bucolic, peaceful escape from my daily grind that we’ve designed it to be. I’m still spending lots of time in the garden but my activity (or lack thereof) has been limited to sitting under an umbrella and reading my Kindle.
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At mediaOrganic, we have striven (yes this is a correct usage of the word, look it up) to incorporate our vegetable garden into our landscape design. The goal is to have it integrate with and accentuate the rectilinear visual dynamics of our mid-century modernist property. Our courtyard entry is flanked by two beds. The south-facing bed on the right is perfect for watermelons, which benefit greatly from the additional light reflected off the large windows. The courtyard itself is reserved for potted tropicals and herbs.

Here we have swiss chard growing in the left bed. The large serviceberry casts a dappled shadow over this bed most of the day while the house shades it in the afternoon making it a challenging spot to grow summer crops. The chard has done well here so we will experiment further with beets, turnips, carrots, and radishes next year. The plant in the blue pot is a pineapple that I’ve been nurturing for three years. It looks dramatic though I doubt that it will ever bear fruit.

In this early morning shot you can see how the rectilinear layout of the beds plays off the horizontal and vertical lines of the house. To the far left is a bank of yews which helps to separate the garden area from the driveway. Moving right we have the asparagus bed. During the summer, the asparagus fronds reach a height of six to seven feet which act as a screen to keep prying eyes from our private garden space. In the background a row of boxwoods runs in front of the large windows. I have been contemplating pulling these and replacing them with another berry or other fruiting perennial. We shall see.

Here you can again see the rectilinear garden layout and how the structures are used to define the space. To the left are my Apache blackberries which grow up to eight feet tall. The three posts have support wires between them so I can tie up the blackberries. This entire element forms a natural back wall to the garden area. Garlic is planted in the bed at the foot of the support posts and the path traces around the perimeter of the beds.

From the northwest corner you can see how the garage and the asparagus bed (background, right) define the south side of the garden, the house defines the west side, while the blackberry trellis defines the north side. Our plan is to install a solid fence along the east boundary to improve the intimacy of this space. This corner of the garden has been most challenging and is still a work-in-progress because it is a junction point for the bluestone patio, the stonedust garden paths and the natural paths covered in dried pine needles. The triangular bed (currently raspberries) defines a set of crossroads, one from the garden, the other from the patio.

In a future post I will review the new south garden which we began to install this year and take a look at our mini fruit orchard on the west side of the property.