Thinking outside the Yard

Butternut squash blossom from a plant in last year's garden. I don't have enough sun for squash, but I'm always unrealistically optimistic about what I can plant. Squash blossoms are edible and are supposed to be tasty stuffed, but I let my flowers turn into vegetables -- which didn't reach maturity.

Until last year, my front "lawn," if you could call it that, was a mixture of scratchy brownish-green crab grass, weeds, and mushrooms. One of my favorite ways to spend a warm, sunny afternoon is lying on a patch of soft green grass and reading a good book. But my grass has never been cut out for that job.

That's why, when I saw a book called Eat Your Yard (see recommended products link at right) at a small, independent bookstore in NH, I started thinking outside the box, or rather, outside the lawn. Everyone has all this grass in front of their houses, but how many of us actually do anything with it, besides mow it? Because mowing the lawn typically falls to me in our household, it didn't take much to convince me that I'd be better off without the ugly brown and scratchy grass.

Common blue violets (past flowering). These pretty flowers rely
on ants to spread and bury their seeds. Ants eat the seed coating,
allowing the seed to sprout. The young leaves and the flowers
are edible and high in vitamin C. We have a lot of ants, so our
yard had a lot of blue violets.

Why not plant a garden that was both edible and attractive? A mixture of native edible plants and carefully planned cultivated ones? I thought of the attractive garden at a local children's museum. Native "weeds" had been cultivated in such a way as to produce an attractive country-style flower garden. I thought of all the "weeds" I'd been eating and admiring and imagined how they could transform my yard. I could just picture myself reading a book while sitting on a cute little garden bench surrounded by fruit trees, edible flowers, and attractive salad greens.

I began leafing through books on edible landscaping and letting my imagination take over. The theory of turning my lawn into a garden was a good one, but actually implementing it, I knew, would be crazy. Every time I began telling someone about my idea, I started with all the reasons it wouldn't work. For one thing, I have a well-established history as a terrible gardener. I plant seeds for the garden I wish I had (a sunny one) rather than the one I actually have (mostly shady). I don't weed. I forget to water. About the only thing I'd successfully grown was herbs (which are happy to be ignored) and peas (even my 5-year-old can grow those).

Then there was the fact that we hoped to move within a year or two, and gardens take many years to become established. Why not wait for the new house? We'd just have to dig it all up and plant grass again the following year. Most prospective home buyers probably want a lawn in front of their house, not a wannabe garden.

Cost was not an insignificant factor. Purchasing the plants, not to mention the compost, I wanted would not be cheap, and what if some or even most of the plants didn't make it? Given my gardening history and the inevitable transplanting that would have to occur, the possibility of wasted money could not be ignored.

And yet there were some points in favor of digging up our lawn and planting or encouraging edibles. First, of course, was that almost anything would have to be an improvement over what we had. Our grass didn't feel nice, and it certainly didn't look nice. We only mowed it so that it wouldn't look any worse. But what's the point of taking care of something you know will never give you more than sub-par results?

Besides, trying my hand at an attractive, edible landscape at this house would let me practice in a place where the results didn't matter too much (my husband thought of that one). We could transfer most of the plants to the new house and plant nicer grass for the new owners when we were ready to sell.

The most persuasive argument in favor of project "dig up our lawn," though, was that it was going to be fun. And so, we were persuaded. Remembering my past gardening mistakes, I began by making a list of edible, attractive plants that would grow well in part shade (my books all had suggestions for such plants). Then I found some graph paper, measured my lawn, and transferred its dimensions to the paper. I designed a circular garden path and began placing plants from my list in different sections according to how much sun they needed.

Jerusalem artichokes were one of the
plants that would have preferred more sun,
but they still did alright. I'm planning to
transplant them to a sunnier location
at our new house. The edible portion
is the underground tuber.

Next, I ordered plants or seeds online. (Admission: old habits die hard -- I couldn't resist ordering a few plants that really need more sun than I have, but I was fairly realistic.) Now I had a deadline for getting rid of my grass and preparing the soil for planting; dormant plants would soon be showing up at my door, and I'd need a place to put them. We borrowed a Rototiller from a friend, and my husband tore up the lawn. I then asked permission to take boxes out of the dumpster at our local Agway, and we covered the churned-up grass with the cardboard. This would kill the grass over the course of a couple of years, in which time the cardboard would decompose and turn into soil.

The highlight for the kids was when a dump truck arrived to deposit our pile of compost, which we then raked over the cardboard. The compost was only a couple of inches thick, but if I needed to plant anything deeper than that, I would just cut an X in the cardboard and dig a deeper hole.

The scale of this project was daunting. We did not have a big yard, but let me remind you that my previous gardens -- which, at roughly one by three yards, were much smaller -- had always ended as a tangle of unrecognizable weeds. One of the things that I find most exciting about edible wild plants is that nature has done all the nurturing for me. Would I kill the plants? Would my front yard end up looking like a vacant lot? Would all the time and effort and money I'd spent be wasted? (Not wasted, my mother-in-law -- always supportive -- reminded me; if nothing else, I was funding a gardening education.)

Strawberries typically also prefer more sun. The plants
did fine but did not produce that many
berries, and squirrels and chipmunks got more than we did.

Now that it's winter and the plants are all in the compost heap or lying dormant in wait of spring, I can look back on it all and assess. So how did it go? Well, my yard never looked like the cute little country garden I was shooting for, but nor did I expect it to in its first season. It also did not end up looking like a vacant lot, so I'm going to give myself a point for that. Maybe two points. I set up timed sprinklers, so my forgetful watering habits didn't matter. Because many of the weeds were edible, I didn't have as much weeding to do, and because the garden was in front of my house, where I could not help but look at it several times a day, I got out there and weeded the plants I couldn't eat. I thought of it less as weeding and more as foraging -- what tasty surprises would I be able to find? (I kept discovering ground-cherry plants in unexpected places.)

Only a few of the plants died (one was a butternut tree that some malicious animal kept pulling up until the tree just couldn't take any more uprooting). And we got a fair amount of harvest, including lettuce, wild spinach, tomatoes, ground cherries, dock, sorrel, Swiss chard, primrose roots, day lilies, violets, Johnny jump-ups, borage, and herbs. The fruit and nut trees and bushes won't make fruit until next year at the minimum (and the nut trees will take about 18 years to fruit), but all grew significantly over the season. Most importantly, the kids and I had a lot of fun working in and eating from the garden. I'm calling it a success.

Pictures of some of what I grew are below, but I also planted a hedge of fruit bushes, wintergreen, kale, beets (which did not do well for some reason), Swiss chard, blueberries, some miniature pear and plum trees, butternut trees, day lilies, and squash. I also transplanted some mayapples I found in New Jersey (they don't grow natively hear but can live here if transplanted) and some bunchberries from New Hampshire. Neither one did too well after transplanting, so I'm waiting to see whether they'll come up in the spring. Additionally, I encouraged the blue violets (pictured above), so this year I should have no trouble collecting enough flowers to make violet syrup (I had to cut the recipe in half last year as a result of insufficient harvest).

Photo Gallery

Another view of the Jerusalem artichokes, which get taller than me.

The red-flowered plants are runner beans. The beans are much longer than the typical variety of garden bean. They are edible but not as delicious as the red flowers, which taste exactly like sweet peas. The yellow flowers are evening primrose. The buds, flowers, young greens, and roots are all edible. I planted the runner beans, but the evening primrose grew on its own. See my October 12 post for an account of my primrose pancakes.

My middle son picking the peas out of the runner-bean pods. The entire bean is edible, although the peas are tastiest. However, we were collecting the peas not to eat but to plant in our garden next year.

The seeds of the scarlet runner bean are hot pink dappled with purple. Beautiful!

Runner-bean flowers.

Anise hyssop was a new herb for me this year. The leaves and flowers are edible and reminiscent of licorice. I made a distinctive (and tasty) stir fry flavored with anise hyssop.

Anise hyssop flower.

Here is a black nightshade plant (a native "weed" that makes delicious black berries in the tomato family) growing along side sand cherry (left front) and rosemary (right front) bushes. I collected black nightshade in quantity from our local train station this fall and made a delicious sauce to serve over pork tenderloin. The berries in my garden did not all ripen at the same time, so we could only nibble here and there.

This black nightshade plant is atypically tree-like. Usually the plant is low and spreading. The berries on this plant never tasted very good, either.

Borage is one of my favorite edible flowers. The taste of the flowers reminds me of cucumbers. It comes in white and blue varieties and easily self-seeds. I planted it last year but expect it to grow "wild" this year.

Evening primrose. The flowers are a bit spicy.

Evening primrose rosette. This is the stage at which you want to collect the root. When the plant is in its flowering year, it has used most of the root's energy to produce the stalk and flowers.

Goosefoot grain (wild-spinach seed). The young leaves and grains are edible. This plant grows wild.

Another view of goosefoot grain. Yet another name for this plant is lambs' quarters.

Johnny jump-ups don't taste like much, but they make a pretty and nutritious addition to a salad. I planted these from seed.

Nasturtiums are beautiful but too spicy for me!

Variegated sage. Other herbs in my garden included parsley (now in my freezer -- this year I learned that one can throw parsley or basil leaves in the freezer as is for easy, fresh-tasting flavor throughout winter), basil, oregano, thyme, chives, rosemary, and mint.

This is possibly French sorrel. I did plant some sorrel, but not where this plant was growing, and none came up where I planted it. The leaves of this plant looked like huge versions of sheep sorrel (which grows wild at my house), so I tasted one and got the characteristic lemony flavor. This was the only such plant that sprouted in my garden, unfortunately. It was so delicious that I certainly hope to find it in my garden again this year, and in quantities I can actually cook with!

Although I previously have not had luck with eating my tomatoes before the wildlife does, this year we got lots of them. I planted all sorts of varieties, including yellow pear (shown here) and a small, sweet grape tomato that was the tastiest I've ever had. Unfortunately, I'm no longer sure what variety it was.