Foodscaping Part 1: What is Foodscaping?
Foodscaping is the practice of blending edible plants into a traditional landscape so that your yard is both beautiful and productive. Instead of separating ornamental plants from vegetable gardens, foodscaping mixes fruit trees, herbs, vegetables, and edible perennials right into landscape beds and front yards. The result is a landscape that not only adds beauty to your home and property, but also grows food that you and your family can enjoy. A foodscape can also help deepen your connection with your landscape, by giving you the satisfaction of growing fresh and healthy fruits, vegetables, and herbs. Beyond creating beauty and producing healthy food, foodscaping also has many other practical benefits. It supports pollinators, encourages biodiversity, and helps people connect more closely with the land they live on and the food they eat. For many gardeners, foodscaping is a more sustainable and meaningful approach to landscaping — one that turns everyday yards into living, productive ecosystems.
In a foodscaped yard, edible plants take on roles normally filled by ornamentals. A well-designed foodscape often includes fruit trees, fruiting shrubs, raised-bed vegetable gardens, and a host of edible and native plants in the spaces in between. A fruit tree might provide shade in place of an ornamental shade tree or flowering tree. Barbados cherry, an attractive fruit-producing shrub, can serve as a hedge. Pineapples, aloe vera, and monstera function as groundcovers under a sparse tree canopy. In northern landscapes, edible greens, peppers, and herbs can be planted in place of annual flowers for seasonal interest. Here in Florida, annual vegetables such as kale, collards, and okra can be grown within landscape beds to provide both food and attractive foliage. Many edible plants add interesting textures, vibrant colors, and unique aromas. When thoughtfully arranged, they create a landscape that feels lush, intentional, and inviting. Foodscapes also incorporate trellises or small arbors for climbing and vining edibles such as passionfruit or muscadine grape. Raised bed gardens can be tucked into the sunny spaces between edible perennials and fruiting shrubs. Any combination of these creates a foodscape that elevates a backyard space to another level of color, variety and vibrant growth.
A well-designed and cared for foodscape has many benefits such as reducing food costs and promoting a healthy lifestyle. For example, a mature mango tree can easily produce several hundred fruits in a single season - a savings of several hundred dollars! It is also impressive how productive a relatively small raised garden bed can be. A four foot by eight foot garden bed planted with a few peppers, eggplants and tomatoes can generously provide you (and your friends and neighbors!) with fresh veggies for several weeks or even months. For most of our clients, however, the primary benefits of foodscaping extend beyond the monetary value of the food. Foodscaping is a fulfilling and satisfying outdoor activity that improves our overall quality of life. We are rewarded when we engage ourselves with an activity that creates beauty and provides delicious food that we can share with others. We benefit individually and as a community by supporting pollinators and birds while reducing our impact on the environment. While reducing the monthly grocery bill is possible, the many other benefits that come from foodscaping are priceless.
Foodscapers typically embrace many concepts found in permaculture and agroforestry, such as utilizing support plants, multi-layer planting arrangements, succession planting, and companion planting. These practices are used to encourage beneficial relationships and minimize competition and other negative interactions between plants. At Ecovision, we design foodscapes with a wide palette of native wildflowers, shrubs, clumping grasses, and ground covers. When planted alongside the fruit trees and edible plants, these support plants help create a healthy ecosystem within the foodscape as well as in the neighborhood. We routinely plant Florida wildflowers, such as Blanket Flower and Black-eyed Susan around fruit trees and other edible plants to add a splash of color and to outcompete unwanted weeds. Seasonal veggies can be planted in the same way on the south side of most fruit trees or shrubs. These plants take advantage of the improved soil, protection and potential irrigation that is already present. Utilizing these areas for annual vegetable plantings doesn’t compete with the long term perennial plant. Instead it gets you into your landscape more often, which is better for you and your trees.
In Southwest Florida our subtropical climate supports a wide variety of edible plants. This means that we have many options of food producing trees, shrubs, and annuals plants available to create a foodscape from scratch or to weave into an existing landscape. An established landscape with mature trees and shrubs may have limited opportunities to integrate edible plants, while a sparse landscape with ample sunlight and space provides a blank slate for foodscaping. The most important step, whether starting from scratch or an established landscape, is to develop a plan before planting. At Ecovision we always recommend starting with a good design that considers plant growing requirements for space, light, watering, drainage and soil. Foodscaping doesn’t require redesigning your entire property or becoming a full-time gardener. You can start small — with a few herbs near the entryway, a fruit tree in place of a flowering tree, or edible groundcovers beneath existing plants. Over time, these small additions can grow into a landscape that is not only beautiful to look at but also delicious to harvest from. At Ecovison we design with this in mind, combining both edible and native species to create landscapes that are abundant, and aesthetically pleasing.
Foodscaping is an amazing way to enhance your landscape and improve your quality of life. A foodscape can also help support pollinators and birds, reduce your grocery bill, and create opportunities for you to share the bounty and beauty you have created with others. If any of this sounds good to you and you want to get started with a foodscape design or installation project, we are ready to help!
To Be Continued: Foodscaping Part 2: Getting Started on your own Foodscape