DIY Gardening Tips

submitted: Jun 4th 2008 | by: Admin | Total views: 158 | Word Count: 484 | |

A lot of people are now moving to having more natural landscapes, some even with edible or otherwise useful plants. A lot of vegetable plants are quite attractive, and many edible plants exhibit ornamental varieties.

Often, since they return every year, without any need to replant them, people use perennial vegetables in creating their edible landscapes. Once they’ve been planted, they continue to supply you with food and beauty for as long as you take care of them.

All they usually need is a little water and a little food, besides the occasional pruning, weeding, or insect control. There are many kinds of vegetables that will continue to feed you every year. They often die during the winter season, but come springtime, they return and undergo a new growth cycle.

Taking care of a traditional garden can be a lot of work, and you may wish to avoid the hassle. You would constantly have to rake, hoe, weed, water, spray, and fertilize a traditional garden. On the other hand, creating an edible landscape requires hardly any more work than a traditional garden!

You can easily replace a variety of aspects in traditional landscaping with elements from edible landscaping. Fruit trees can replace standard trees. Perennial herbs easily take the place of ground covers or shrubs. Ornamental vegetables can be used to replace borders, flowers, or other accents.

Mixing edible plants with standard plants can bring your garden some beautiful combinations. Herbs especially tend to make superb additions to your flower garden. It’s easy to mix many types of plants together for a vagarious look.

Many kinds of plants can be made beautiful alongside curly parsley, such as lobelia, pansies, dusty miller, dianthus, or strawberries. Great plants for low shrubbery, perhaps as edging for larger bushes, are sage and oregano, both of which are very beautiful. For your accent areas, you can use leaf lettuces. You could edge an area with a border grass, and then fill it with different colors and types of leaf lettuce for a beautiful look.

There is also a variety of plants which have edible flowers. Often, these include other edible parts as well. While they are in bloom, they can form a very lovely part of your landscape. Sugar snap peas are delicious and they have very pretty pink, white, or purple flowers.

You can get white and red flowers from fava beans, or stunning purple globe-shaped ones from chives. Dill has yellowish blossoms, and nasturtium has yellow, orange, and red blossoms which are even edible. Sage blossoms are blue and purple, as are those of salvia.

Since they need so little maintenance, planting perennial vegetables and herbs in edible landscapes is great and easy. Some plants you could try include perennial broccoli, sweet potatoes, dandelions, sorrel, rhubarb, both normal and Jerusalem artichokes, fennel, chives, ginger, garlic chives, and asparagus.

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