By combining native plants, ornamentals and flowers with a food garden, you can create a beautiful and productive outdoor space that will provide fresh produce, attract wildlife, and bring joy to your life. It is a wonderful way to bring beauty, sustainability, and fresh produce to your outdoor space. Create a unique & thriving edible landscape with natives, flowers, ornamentals & food crops.
Natives, flowers, ornamentals, food crops
Research native plants. Start by researching the types of native plants that grow in your area and how they can complement your food garden. Choose plants that are hardy, low maintenance, and have multiple uses, such as pollinators for your food crops or providing shade for your vegetables.
Choose plants that are well adapted to your climate and soil conditions. This will help ensure their success and reduce the need for frequent watering and maintenance.
Plan your garden layout carefully to make the most of the available space and sunlight. Consider the height and spread of each plant to ensure that they all have enough room to grow.
Prepare your soil for food crops. Follow our Transformational Gardening method. Use our microbe-rich compost as the soil for your food gardens and use microbe-rich worm castings instead of traditional organic fertilizers. If you have conventional soil in your food garden beds make you seed furrows and seedling holes larger the normal so you can add extra microbe-rich compost.
Prepare soil for the native, flower and ornamentals. Use conventional soil amended with compost, organic matter, and other soil amendments as needed to ensure that your plants have the nutrients they need to thrive.
Be creative about placement. Mix your native plants and flowers with your food crops to create a beautiful and functional garden. Make sure the food crops get enough sun. See our post Optimizing Sunlight & Temperature. For example, you could plant a border of wildflowers around your vegetable beds or intersperse flowering shrubs and trees among your fruit bushes and trees.
Use biodiversity and companion planting to your advantage. Certain plants can help improve the growth and health of your food crops. Lots of native plants, flowers and ornamentals can help keep pests away from your veggies. For example, planting marigolds among your tomatoes can help deter pests and disease. See our post Biodiversity Planting.
Make use of vertical gardening to maximize your growing space. Train climbing plants like beans, peas, and tomatoes up trellises or create living walls with a combination of edible and ornamental plants.
Incorporate water features such as birdbaths, ponds, or rain barrels into your garden to provide habitat for wildlife and support pollinators. Incorporate drip irrigation to save time and water. Ask our customer support team about our new drip-irrigation kits.
Use mulch to conserve moisture, suppress weeds, and regulate soil temperature. This will help reduce the amount of time and effort required for maintenance. Dense leaf mulch is sold on our online store for creating edible landscapes that include native plants, flowers, shrubs and ornamental plants. BUT don’t use this mulch on your raised bed food gardens..
Use straw mulch and compost for mulching food gardens to suppress weeds and keep moisture in the soil. We recommend that you place a half inch layer of our compost around your plants before applying the chopped straw. Or apply this double layer of compost and straw over the entire bed.
Enjoy your garden and the abundance it provides! Harvest your crops regularly to keep them producing, and don't be afraid to experiment with new plant combinations and techniques.
“Grow Your Own Food” blog posts
See the full list of our Grow Your Own Food blog posts. Each post is assigned ”tags” which are under the post title. If you need a quick answer to a gardening question give us a call or send a text to our customer support team – support[at]deep-roots-project.org AND 708-655-5299.
Deep Roots online store
See our online store for details about prices, ordering and delivery of raised beds, planter boxes, microbe-rich compost, worm castings, leaf mulch and more. We don’t sell traditional soil, since we use 100% compost as our growing medium. Our online store has 2 sections – (1) raised beds and planter boxes and (2) compost, worm castings, fertilizer.
Please contact our customer support team before placing an order online so we can assist you with the details and answer your gardening questions. You can pay by credit card in the store or by check.
(708) 655-5299 and support[at]deep-roots-project.org
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