Beginning Tips for Your Edible Garden in Fall

Evaluate your garden this fall for areas that might lend themselves well to the addition of edible plants. Here are some creative ideas to get you started:

1) Use edible plants as decorative borders, formal hedges and screen plantings. Compact berry bushes, germander and garlic chives make great perennial borders and hedges. Bush basil and rosemary are great choices for aromatic annual borders. Bush cherries and elderberries create taller edible screens along property lines or add structure to perennial beds.

2) Add vertical structure to your garden with dwarf fruit trees and edible vines. Dwarf apple, pear, cherry and crabapple trees add wonderful fourseason interest to both small and large gardens. Perennial edible vines like hops, grapes and kiwi require sturdy structures like arbors or trellises to support them, but they provide attractive vertical interest for many years. Train edible annual vines like scarlet runner bean, hyacinth bean and nasturtium on bamboo tripods or wroughtiron tuteurs for short-season fun.

3) Consider planting containers with edibles. Galvanized buckets and washtubs, wood fruit crates and apple baskets—have fun turning unique objects into planters for edible plants. Plant an attractive container with several varieties of mint; it’s a can’t-dowithout- it herb, but it’s too invasive to plant in a mixed perennial bed. Blueberries are wonderful plants for the urban garden, and their need for an acidic grow mix make them a great candidate for a container.