Why Did We Tear This Out?!!!
When your primary focus is growing food sometimes other plants get overlooked. I have to say I’m definitely guilty of this. In a race to use all of our available space to grow food we made the dumb decision to rip out our landscape that was filled with flowers. Soon after we moved the chickens and quickly realized that planting a new landscape – even an edible one – wasn’t going to happen. The established landscape would have been able to hold up to the chickens but anything planted now would quickly get trampled and eaten.
We had Ceanothus (Wild Lilac) which has beautiful cornflower blue flowers that bloomed the earliest in spring. The magenta Penstemon (Beard Tongue) bloomed almost all year round here. In summer the Hemerocallis (Daylily) and Lavandula (Lavender) bloomed together in complementing orange and purple flowers. The Salvia (Mexican Bush Sage) bloomed in late fall. In between all the plants grew a blanket of white clover.
The flowers weren’t just there to be pretty. They provided a long blooming source of forage for our bees and the native pollinators. The hummingbirds and bumble bees would visit the Penstemon on a regular basis. The clover offered consistent forage for the bees and turkeys and it would have also been eaten by the chickens if we had left it. Everything together offered habitat for beneficial insects along with acting as a trap crop for pests. It served an important purpose in helping us avoid using pesticides on our edibles.
But there is also nothing wrong with pretty. My day job involves making landscapes pretty. Pretty can make a space somewhere people want to spend time. It can make a space relaxing. While edibles feed the body, pretty feeds the soul. We need pretty just as much as we need functional. And sometimes, like with our former landscape, pretty can be functional.
I was put up in bed with Pancho keeping my feet warm, and I ventured outside to get some clucky bluster from the hens, and the dood was totally reading my mind, planting some black elderberries, cornelian cherries, and white mulberry in our first raised bed of the garden. With all kinds of cabbages and peppers planted in between. The one plant I would not put into that bed: black mandrake. It is pretty friendly as far as wild and crazy solanums go, but I didn’t want to throw it in with a bunch of edibles. At least, not this year. The super dooper happy surprise of this spring is that our neighbor’s plum tree has a happy green tuft of mistletoe growing in it. Totally makes my day/week/month/season. Mistletoe grows all over the neighborhood, but now I don’t have to go climbing trees to gather berries for inoculating our oak tree when the time comes.