Bob explains how to hedge your bets with a hardy ornamental and edible garden
With increasingly difficult weather, there’s sense in concentrating more on perennial crops.
Trees and shrubs may suffer, but will often still produce harvests in adverse conditions when annual crops fail. They are also firmly in the ground and growing away when it may be near-impossible due to the wet or cold to sow or plant vegetables.
Mind you, there have to be half-decent conditions to plant trees and shrubs properly, although the window to do so is larger. Pot-grown specimens can be planted almost any day of the year, but only if you’re methodical with watering them from then on during dry periods.
However, planting during the next three months is better providing your soil’s neither frozen nor waterlogged. Bare-rooted plants are a better choice than those in containers, whose roots tend to go in circles and need teasing out when planting. But either will do fine providing they are well firmed in, and staked if they are a tree. This is not so much to keep it upright but really to stop the top pulling the roots to and fro as it blows in the wind, as this will weaken the central stability. An old check to see if you’ve planted something firmly enough is to take hold and pull hard; if it comes up easily you’ve just not firmed down sufficiently, so you’d better do it again, properly, using more force packing the soil back down.
Ornamentals with fruits
Now, not everyone wants a utilitarian vegetable plot next to their house, and many prefer to surround themselves with ornamental plants. These can also be productive as well; indeed it almost seems pointless having a purely pretty plant when another has fruits or leaves you can also eat into the bargain.
Obviously apples, pears, plums, figs, cherries, apricots are worth it, and also red and white currants and blueberries which give brilliant displays (though these may be very short unless plants are netted to protect fruit from birds).
Admittedly blackcurrants, gooseberries, honeyberries (the edible honeysuckle Lonicera caerulea, most other honeysuckle berries are poisonous) and raspberries are less beautiful, but they are tasty and effective as foliage plants. Then there are other options more commonly thought of as ornamental which also provide fruits, for jelly if not dessert. Crab apples, Japanese quince Chaenomeles japonica, mahonia and berberis berries all make excellent jellies, as do the stunning yellow flowering Cornus mas, and rowan (there’s a larger and sweeter berried form called Sorbus aucuparia var.edulis).
Nut, hips and berries
There are several attractive elderberry cultivars that give crops and corkscrew hazels also provide nuts every bit as delicious as cultivated varieties. I’d not recommend walnut and sweet chestnut as these get far too big for most gardens, but the little known and not so large Xanthoceras sorbifolium is stunning in flower and has edible foliage and ‘nuts’.
Rosa rugosa hips are large, tasty, make excellent syrup, and their blooms are just as beautiful as other roses. Surprisingly many fuchsias are hardy enough to survive in the open garden AND they have edible berries – in fact fuchsia societies often have a jelly competition.
Grapevines such as ‘Boskoop Glory’, ‘Siegerrebe’ and ‘Regent’ are delicious and productive. They can be hard work but are worth the effort as they look fantastic when well trained.
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