The EDIBLE GARDEN
Vegetables flourish in urban flower beds with minimal effort
BRIE Arthur doesn’t need a tractor or combine to grow a crop of peanuts. She doesn’t even need to plant rows. Her one-acre “suburban foodscape” also yields golden rice, cane sorghum, soybeans and sprawling heirloom tomatoes without upsetting her neighborhood’s tidy-yard police.
The best part of all: She harvests a plentiful bounty.
Arthur, a new-generation garden writer who lives near Raleigh, N.C., will speak at Peckerwood Garden and several other Houston-area venues in early May to share inspiration from her new book, “The Foodscape Revolution: Finding a Better Way to Make Space for Food and Beauty in Your Garden.”
A native of Michigan with a degree in landscape design and horticulture from Purdue University, Arthur began her career about 15 years ago as an estate gardener at the historic, 61-acre Montrose Gardens in Hillsborough, N.C. She worked at two other legendary Southern havens — Camellia Forest and Plant Delights Nursery — before starting her own writing and consulting business.
But she has always followed the advice of Montrose (the North Carolina property) owner Nancy Goodwin, who taught her how to work “smart but not hard.”
That wisdom has become increasingly important. Traveling a lot these days, Arthur now leaves her yard in the hands of her husband and neighborhood children more often than she’d like.
Edible plants play important roles in her one-acre space: They can be more ornamental than one might expect, they increase biodiversity and they can help bring structure to a garden, she said.
The practice of interplanting vegetables in one’s flower beds isn’t new, but Arthur doesn’t just think in terms of tucking an eggplant here, a tomato there. She watches what her region’s farmers are planting, and then scales it down a bit.
She’s looking at land — and vegetable gardening — from a slightly different set of eyes.
“You’re not a farmer,” she said. “You don’t have to plant in straight rows. You can use the texture and color of food crops, just like you would any other plants.”
Arthur started growing peanuts as edging in one of her flower beds after noticing the yellow blossoms on a crop covering many acres. A type of legume, peanuts fix nitrogen into the soil, so they are a built-in fertilizer.
Arthur uses them as edging in composted beds. She said her plants yield 50 to 75 peanuts each in the fall, and harvesting can be a fun task for children and the nongardeners of the family.
“It’s a win-win plant,” she said.
In the Houston area, April is the ideal planting time for peanuts. Don’t laugh: According to the Texas Peanut Producers website, the state’s farmers grow about 489 million pounds of the legumes annually.
Ornamental grasses can be beautiful, but Arthur plants clumps of golden rice for a grassy effect, even in large pots. She harvests enough to eat it for three months, several times a week.
She has also planted cane sorghum, which grows 10-12 feet tall, as a screen, along with sunflowers and sesame seed, to harvest for bird food. Soybeans at the base keep the sorghum fertilized.
Arthur also likes to edge with garlic and onions to deter inground mammals. That’s not a common gardening issue in Houston, given its clay soil, but garlic and onions are relatives of the fancy ornamental alliums that bloom in late spring-early summer here.
Any plants that have the same soil, light and watering requirements will get along — and flourish, assuming they are placed in the right spot. (Shade, unfortunately, is hard to overcome, for flowers, herbs or vegetables.)
When planting edibles, choose a location in the garden that’s easy to access. You don’t want have to crawl through thorny roses to pick okra.