Vegetable Landscaping

An easy and fun option for mass-plantings in your urban landscape!

Over the past several years, we’ve been slowly tackling the lackluster landscaping that we inherited when we purchased our home. One side of our home was particularly bad, as it was over-planted, overgrown, and the plant material was much too close to the house. Much of my limited landscaping time (outside of the vegetable gardens) had been focused on the front of the house, as we felt obligated to be good neighbors and make our house more presentable from the street. For that project, I used an assortment of leftover plants from my father’s nursery — but more on that another time.

The offending planting on the side of our home was beginning to really bother me, as it was still very visible from our street, and the landscape architect inside of me could no longer stand seeing the mess every day when I returned home from work. So, in a moment of particular frustration, I decided to wipe-out everything on that side of the house and start with a clean slate (a special thanks to my father-in-law who let me borrow a chainsaw and helped with the removal). “Most anything would look better than this, even an empty flower bed” I thought to myself as I justified my last-minute decision to pull everything out of the ground. After a few hours of work I was pleased with this initial result, but my satisfaction quickly dissipated as I began to think “well now what?”

Although I’ve given some thought to the long-term plan for this particular area of our yard, my quick initial decision that spring meant we needed to do something to at least tide us over for that year. After doing a bit of work to square-up the edges of the bed, and adding some manure compost to amend the soil, we decided to use this as a space to grow some extra annual flowers for cutting purposes. This worked so well, that we decided to try it again the following summer. It was nice to have lots of space for a cut-flower bed, and it added some much needed cheer to that side of the house (and tangentially, to the view of our house from the street).

This past summer, we decided to try something new in our “unassigned” and “unplanned” flower bed along our house — why not use it to grow some veggies? Given the relatively limited bed space in our vegetable garden, we have to somewhat limit our plant choices there. We do get creative with the space, using the vertical space to grow crops such as cucumbers, melons, and squash, but that does require some extra attention and care. So, after amending the soil again with manure compost, we set about planting several squash (including pumpkin) plants along the side of our house. Despite a few cross pollinations (which was expected, and a lot of fun for fall decorating with the kids!), the plants did very well there with little care, and produced copious amounts of veggies. The giant and healthy squash leaves created a beautiful ‘mass planting’ along the side of the house that looked great all summer long.

It was a lot of fun to experiment with our first true edible landscape this summer, and we plan on vacations of this around the yard in the years ahead. The squash plants were a great option for this particular location, as their foliage and blooms provided a beautiful landscape for several months. The plants established quickly — more so than the flowers we had tried before — so the bed was filled-out for much more of the warmer months. If you are looking to create a fun and edible ‘mass planting’ in your own landscape, you might try some summer vegetable plants!

// Dad Gardener