Perhaps you’ve always wanted a vegetable garden but don’t have the space? Here are some ways to add vegetables to your landscape in a beautiful way.

Foliage

Rhubarb offers stunning bright green foliage with red stems. It’s a back drop for lighter foliage and flowers. Only the stalks are edible; leaves are toxic. Replace ornamental kale and cabbages with beautiful edible varieties. Dinosaur kale resembles a small palm tree at 2-3 feet height in sword-like slashes of blue green. Other kales paint the garden in light green to dark burgundy with flat, puckered and curly leaf shapes. Rainbow Swiss chard also adds volume to borders and the soup pot.

Leaf lettuces in close, creative patterns make a beautiful display. Try loose leaf red and green oak leaf, flashy butter oak, Mervile des Quatre Saisons, and butter crunch. Harvest outer leaves first. Cut an inch from the ground and to encourage a second growth. Successive seeding will assure an evolving garden and constant supply. In the fall replace lettuce with arugula. It’s long lacey leaf and nutty flavor is sure to please.

Small fruits

Fruit bearing bushes like evergreen huckleberries, blueberries, currants, and serviceberries fit nicely into a front yard. They lend a colorful burst of flowers and then bright berries. Catch them quickly before the birds do! They’re easy to care for because they’re indigenous to our area. Other low maintenance potentials are fig trees and hazelnut bushes. Consider dwarfed or espaliered apple and pear trees. Specimens with multiple varieties can cross-pollinate. Or chose a self-pollinating columnar apple for a sunny front step. These are very efficient producers.

Herbs

Herbs add not only color, but tantalizing scents. Chives, sport balls of purple flowers can hardly be topped, except by an elephant garlic that can grow up to seven feet! Pick a sunny location for this one. Plant several eight inches apart. After harvest the huge purple, ball flowers last for months and don’t smell like garlic. Complete the lavender color scheme with lavender and rosemary. Rosemary is an evergreen bush, which has brilliant spring flowers. If you want an herbal tree, there is the sweet bay, the Laurel Noblis. Other bay trees are toxic. These can be pruned to any size and shape.

Flowers

Some flowers are edible. Gourmet chefs complement their best dishes with them. Weave in nasturtium, violas, roses, and calendulas. Who cannot smile at the sight of a sunflower? These delicious seeds take us back to childhood. They need sun and bit of support so might be happiest against the house or fence.

Vegetables

The Globe artichoke, up to six feet, makes a definitive statement. It provides hearty edible fruit and gone to seed, amazing purple flowers. If you have a garden gate, arbor, or trellis think about planting purple pole beans. They have beautiful foliage, produce heavily and are easy to harvest. If you’re not anxious to advertise your edibles, green varieties blend into the foliage, still providing abundance and elegant shade. Perhaps you could tuck a pepper plant right next to the spent tulips in front of a broadleaf evergreen. Obviously, the space is crying for color. Are you getting braver? Try an Early Girl tomato next to the dying stand of Iris.

Once you’ve walked your garden munching fresh cherry tomatoes, snap peas, or handfuls of blueberries you’ll begin to edge out the inedible one-by-one.
Gardening questions? Master Gardeners staff clinics at farmer’s markets or you can call WSU Extension office. 9 am – 4 pm 425-357-6010

Photography by: Richelle Taylor