When we moved, our house had some lovely generic landscaping. Palm trees, asparagus fern, generic bushes. Nice, but not us. I wanted to go with a more edible and interesting landscape, but know very little about landscape design, so, of course, I turned to books.
The first book I got is called Landscaping with Fruit by Lee Reich. Attractive and colorful page layout make it easy to imagine a lush, fruitful garden. The beginning of the book has some basics about landscaping, but it didn't make much sense to me. Hopefully another book will. This one, however, is still inspirational. It considers the garden a work in progress. Something to be changed over time. This was an important consideration, since I don't want to make a mistake. The idea that I can always change it up gave me courage.
The book's second half is a detailed description of the fruiting plants Reich considers tasty and landscape worthy. He rates them in terms of beauty, taste and ease of growing. He suggests how to use them in the landscape. And, of course, he gives a picture of the fruits. Occasionally, he also shows the tree or plant, which is helpful to picture whether that is what I want in my yard.
With his encouragement, we planned a grape arbor and strawberry ground cover. We dug out the bushy things and the small palm trees--the foundation plants (learned they're called foundation plants from Lee Reich). Then we started constructing the grape arbor. We also planted a 5-in-one apple tree in front of each of the large, south-facing bedroom windows in hopes of shielding them somewhat from the intense summer heat. After I purchased the trees from Home Depot I had doubts about the quality of the trees after reading on some forums which suggested HD trees were inferior to private nursery trees. I didn't know anything about my well-shaped little twig trees, so I called Home Depot to find out the root stock and expected height. Nobody at Home Depot knew any details about the trees and suggested I call the grower, whose number they didn't have. Luckily, Google knew the number. I called the grower, Dan, and got the skinny on the trees. MM111 root stock. 9-12 feet tall. He discussed edible landscaping, especially with deciduous trees. Dan also inadvertently told me he sold to my local nursery. Same trees, half the price at HD. Go me.
After completing the grape arbor, we plan to replace the ivy with strawberry plants. I'm not sure how we'll remove the ivy. Everyone tells us we have to use poison. We're going to try digging it out and see how it goes. I'm intimidated by the massiveness of the job ahead.
