Adding Ornamental Edibles to Your Landscape

The beautiful fall orange color of a blackberry cane is decidedly ornamental.

I have always had an eye toward growing my own food.  Maybe it is because my dad is a farmer.  I know where food comes from; someone has to grow it.  Maybe it is because I live in a food desert of a sort; because I live in an agricultural area, unless you grow it, it is terribly expensive, or not to be had unless you find something that is damaged falling off a truck.  Maybe I am just too cheap to buy it because I can grow it.

The decorative aspect of the savoy type cabbage which was grown in a large pot along with a canna and crocosimia  (non-edibles) is hard to deny.  As I only eat a cabbage or two a year, growing a couple in a pot is ideal.

I don't know, but I have always tried to incorporate as many edibles into my landscape as possible.

Blackberries Are Ripe!

(Some raspberries, too!)

Blackberries are at best a rambunctious lot. Large, thick virtually uncontrollable. They even have thorns on their leaves! Come on!

The rambunctious canes easily grow 5' to 7' tall and run everywhere. They are not the well-mannered (in comparison) brambles of my misspent youth, which I have since learned were dewberries. No, these blackberries take being blackberries to new heights of zealotry.

In an effort to control them in the potager, early this spring I cut them back to four feet. The end-result is a massing of berries right at that tip as you can see i the picture below.

Be sure to leave them on the plant until fully ripe so the full sweetness is allowed to develop. The least bit of burgundy red that appears more black than red will leave you with a tart taste and thought about the wisdom of adding these crazed brambles to your disciplined garden.

I highly recommend tying and torturing them to some sort of wired growing structure to keep them within bounds, increase your yields and keep the gardener from becoming a bleeding and scratched victims of its growth!

Their upside? I am growing mine in the shade of an Austrian black pine, fence and garage structures and their don't seem to mind the shade. They take about three years to establish themselves. Once a cane has produced berries, cut it out in preparation for taming the next year's producers.

First Strawberry Today!

I ate my first strawberry from my strawberry patch this morning. The local U-pick is advertising "Strawberries in Three Weeks!" They must not have 'Honeyoye'!


When I was a kid, I knew where all the best blackberry grew wild. Those beds have long ago been plowed over to make way for more corn field or to enable a walk-around irrigation system. Two years ago, a friend gave me a couple cuttings from the biggest blackberries I have ever seen. I could not believe these blackberries with canes a thick as my thumb! The arching canes each send up a 5" cluster of blooms that will bear as much as any one cane did in my childhood.



Strawberry 'Honeoye loaded down on these plants I set out last fall.


No problem with those 'Georgia Jet' sweet potatoes that looked dead on arrival. Score one for Jung's! The minute these slips fill in the 3.5" deep pots.