Foodscape your garden Why replacing ornamentals with edibles is the next big thing… When we picture an edible garden, we typically imagine neat rows of grouped vegetables, tidy orchards or raised beds overflowing with produce. These gardens have their own designated spaces, and a clear identity that most gardeners recognise. But what if your edible garden could match the meticulously landscaped areas of the rest of your garden? At first glance, you may not even know many of the plants were edible, as they blend seamlessly into your design aesthetic. That’s the goal of foodscaping, a popular movement combining the growth of edibles with the practice of landscaping. Foodscaping is not only about design, or making your garden beautiful and functional at the same time. It’s also about using all available garden space to grow your own produce to improve health, save money and combat food insecurity. Foodscaping focuses on lowmaintenance gardening – far from the labourintensive edible gardening practices many of us are accustomed to. This means lower water usage, fewer additional chemical products and less time spent worrying about your harvest overall. Now that we’ve established why, the next question is – how? The scope of edible plants is massive, translating to a mass of different garden uses. Replace your typical groundcovers, hedges, bedding plants, containers and even houseplants with edible alternatives that look great and feed you year-round.
Edible groundcover Groundcovers are an important part of a landscaped garden. They serve an aesthetic purpose – covering open spots of soil with greenery and colour – but also a practical one, acting as a living mulch that retains moisture in the soil and keeps weeds at bay. There are many
