Landscaping With Vegetables: Mixing Flowers And Vegetables

Kale In The Garden
ornamental kale
(Image credit: Sarah Stierch)

A lot of people do vegetable landscaping in their yard. There are a lot of reasons that people would actually incorporate vegetables and herbs into the landscaping around their home. For one thing, not everyone has a yard large enough for an actual vegetable garden.

Vegetable landscaping allows the grower to enjoy home-grown fruits and vegetables and save on their grocery bills without having to have a large separate vegetable garden.

Landscaping with Vegetables

So, what vegetables can be used for landscapes? There are plenty. Vegetable landscapes are nothing more than mixing flowers and vegetables throughout the garden, otherwise known as edible landscaping. In this type of garden design, you can have fruit and nut trees growing in the same place as your ornamental plants. Vegetables can be grown alongside your flowers too. It doesn't matter.

Landscaping with vegetables is simple. You can mix vegetables in flower gardens by weaving flowers throughout the garden or by lining the outside of the garden with cabbage and lettuce. There are plenty of vegetable plants that can be incorporated in the landscaping around your home. Some of the most common vegetables for landscaping include:

Vegetable Landscaping History

Landscaping with vegetables has been done forever. Back in Medieval times, the monastic gardens included flowers, medicinal herbs and vegetables. Today, as yards get smaller with population in the cities growing, it is becoming more and more popular.

Edible plants have special condition requirements just like anything else you would plant in your garden. Make sure you mix vegetables in flower gardens that share the same growing requirements.

Benefits of Mixing Flowers and Vegetables

Mixing flowers and vegetables makes sense. Some flowers actually are used in vegetable gardens to keep bugs and animals away, as with companion gardening. When mixing flowers and vegetables, just make sure everything in the garden requires the same amount of watering and food.

Again, if you are still wondering "What vegetables can be used for landscaping," the answer is as varied as the different types of plants out there. Use your best judgment when mixing flowers and vegetables in the same garden space, and use your imagination when going for the aesthetic value you seek in the gardens around your home.

You can't go wrong when landscaping with vegetables.

Kathee Mierzejewski
Writer

Kathee Mierzejewski was with Gardening Know How in the very beginning, writing many of the site's foundational articles.