Fruit and vegetables are among the necessary flora because they need a lot of nutrients and water to produce the delicious, healthy food that we like to eat.
Given that many gardeners work in limited space, what if we want to grow food for people and at the same time want to create habitat with indigenous plants to save the world?
You can Do both, and very beautiful, experts say by creating an edible habitatt garden that separates the very different water and nutrients from the plants that feed people and the native plants that pollinators and other animals need to thrive.
The key is something that landscape designer Sophie Pennes calls “Hydro-Zoning when we link plants by tackling zones.”
In essence, most indigenous plants prefer undisputed soils and need little water once they are established. In fact, the normal water that most vegetables need to thrive can give a death bell for native perennials, especially in late summer, when many are sleeping.
“You have to keep them on individual irrigation zones,” said Tim Becker, horticultural director for the Theodore Payne Foundation. “That is the most important thing because you often do water for vegetables, and you don’t often give water for natives.”
Becker said, indigenous plants have adapted to grow in poor soil and are not doing well in changed soils that are rich in the nutrients that crave vegetables.
The trick, Pennes said, is to grow fruit and vegetables in separate raised beds and then break the remaining soil with native plants. In this way you can enrich the soil for your fruit and vegetables and indigenous plants grow in the unparalleled soil that they prefer.
In fact, many indigenous plants do not need regular irrigation at all if they are located with carrot systems that find water deep in the ground, so if you plant native perennials, say, around the outside of the raised beds, the adult plants will probably get all the water they need from the vegetable beds.
Penns’ firm, Urban Farms LA, initially specialized in creating vegetable gardens, but over time the focus has shifted more to creating habitat gardens and water harvesting (ie creating landscapes that preserve rainwater).
That focus was an attraction for Hayden and Hannah Coplen when they again divided their small West Adams garden in November 2023.
Hayden, a musician and music agent, loves walking – “no place gives me more peace,” he said – but with their jobs and little son Silas, making the long journeys to his favorite walking ghost points is more difficult nowadays. So his goal was to try to create those indigenous landscapes around his house again.
Hannah, on the other hand, is a gardener and cook who wanted to expand the small vegetable plaster in their mostly concrete backyard while making a hospitable workspace for her home company, creating merchandise for progressive political campaigns.
Pennes found a way to give them both by creating a rocky, dry-lake area in their small front garden to catch rainwater designed from photos of a creek bed that Hayden took during a walk on Cooper Canyon and to surround mostly native trees and bushes.
In the small back garden, Pennes built three raised beds for vegetables-two with rattles-on one side of their side sidewalk, with a narrow line from Mallow, Verbena and other flourishing native plants on the other side.
A dwarf lemon blooms nearby, next to large containers with Rosemary, a Mexican lime tree and a small Manzanita. Beyond the vegetable beds is a planting area of ​​indigenous bushes and grasses to offer extra habitat and permeable surface to collect rainwater.
The rest of the small backyard contains a raised deck outside their kitchen, an office space where both Hannah and Hayden work, a narrow lap swimming pool and shipping vast-format lawn from St. Augustine Gras where Silas and Dog Dizzy can play. The fence next to the swimming pool is completely covered with a powerful and very fertile passion fruit, which plays a major role in their frequent outdoor meetings.
“We make the best Margaritas with this passion fruit!” Said Hayden. “It is now our house signature cocktail, and we eat our garden all the time. I had a spinach -smoothie from the garden this morning and when we had people, we ate a hummus that Hannah made with Garbanzo beans and our beets, which we ate with celery and radish from the garden.”
Another family, accountant Zach Smith and his wife, Jennifer Strong, marketing and communication director, took a similar route to create their edible habitat. Their unique Voor-Yard landscape has deck and pebble paths with deeply raised beds made of stacked pieces of broken concrete where they grow vegetables, cut flowers and fruit.
The ideas came from Smith’s old friend, landscape architect David Godshal. The almost 100 -year -old house was usually laid out with lawn, plus a long concrete driveway from the street to the garage in the back, Strong said.
“David encouraged us to rip our long driveway and use the broken concrete to make our garden boxes in the front,” Strong said. Initially she was worried about converting the driveway to rounded pebbles, but the change gave them more plant space and had the building catching rainwater instead of ran the concrete. And with the broken concrete to build the garden boxes, they could make long, high beds that are easy to use for planting, weeding and just sitting.
Smith is a swimmer who strongly thinks about water retention, she said, and the pebbles turned out to be no problem. “The hardest thing is to pull our garbage cans to the street,” she said. “But driving and walking on them has been great.”
In their large back garden they were able to create a meadow of native wild flowers and grasses that have dreamed of Strong since she was a child who visited her grandparents’ apple farm in Washington in Spokane Valley, where wild flowers and grasses grew among the orchard rows.
The meadow is surrounded by paths to a variety of fruit trees – avocado, figs, cherry, olive, peach, apple and citrus – as well as boxes full of herbs, a row of blueberries and a rustic chicken run to house their three chickens. And strong, an enthusiastic chef, crashes into the abundance of fruit and fruit that grow around their house.
Almost all plants in their garden are inhabitants of California, except the plants that produce food, such as their gigantic artichoke bush, or flowers for bouquets. The only exception is a pot with orange-flowered tropical milkweed, a non-inactive variety that they keep for sentimental reasons because it reminds them of how they met in Santa Monica. Smith’s dog Cola was fascinated by butterflies and always stopped to look at the princes who are attracted to the milkweed in the front garden of Strong. Strong and her dog Olive then started walking with Smith and Cola.
Now their gardens and the cop lens live with pollinators and other useful insects that we usually do not consider.
“Native plants attract predatory wasps,” said Becker, “so you get natural pest control for your vegetables and vegetables. As a general rule, every collection of native plants is with many different types of flowers [blooming] At different times of the year is good for vegetarian gardening, because in the background you get the benefit of ecology as a good source for pollinators and useful. “
Becker even said that adding hedges of native plants where pollinators could live and reproduce “was a traditional way of agriculture before we were so much focused on petrochemicals. Having these plants near your cultivation place gives you many benefits.”
Hayden Copling certainly agrees. The small “farm” of his family blooms, although he allows part of that success to the increased bravery of his wife in the garden. But creating a landscape of vegetables and native plants also has a different advantage, he said.
“It makes me happy,” he said. “I look out of my bedroom window and see the healthy places where Silas plays and it has an effect on me. I get a feeling of place, like a little oasis. It lands me, and it gives me a good feeling.”
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
