The Edible Front Yard: The Mow-Less, Grow-More Plan for a Beautiful, Bountiful Garden - Softcover

Soler, Ivette

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1604691999 ISBN 13: 9781604691993

Publisher: Timber Pr, 2011

Synopsis

Offers suggestions on designing gardens, incorporating edibles and vegetables with ornamental plants.

About this title

About the Author

Ivette Soler is a garden designer and writer living in Los Angeles, California. Her plant design work for Elysian Landscapes, and her own personal garden, have appeared in magazines such as Metropolitan Home, Sunset, and House and Garden, as well as in several books. Soler’s garden writing has been featured in Garden Design, Cottage Living, and Budget Living, and she was the resident gardening expert on NBC’s The Bonnie Hunt Show. See her popular gardening blog, The Germinatrix, at thegerminatrix.com.

From the Back Cover

Put the fruits of your labors front and center! With plentiful sun, open space, and an audience of appreciative passersby, the front yard has all the ingredients for a beautiful and bountiful garden. Let famed blogger and garden designer Ivette Soler show you how to make over all or part of that space—too often simply unused or purely decorative—into a gorgeously designed oasis of fruits and vegetables that will be the envy of the neighborhood.
 
The Edible Front Yard combines the loveliest and tastiest edibles and ornamentals in a garden that is a year-round feast for the eyes. Soler teaches all the tricks, from laying out the design and choosing the best front yard plants, to clear instruction for a bounty of exciting projects like a fragrant carpet of herbs, a trellis privacy screen using runner beans, and an eye-catching raised bed that turns the hell strip into a little patch of paradise. From the curb right up to your front door, the information in these pages includes everything you need to have a beautiful front yard and eat it too!
 

Reviews

A picture is worth a thousand words, and Soler�s guide to combining vegetables, flowers, herbs, and fruit trees for front yard curb appeal proves it. This �germinatrix� demonstrates with numerous full-color, page-filling photos the literal and figurative beauty in transforming a �wasteful time-consuming, toxic monoculture . . . an anti-social space� into a �more evolved and exciting version of front yard beauty that prizes health, diversity, and pleasure over short-term convenience.� Soler�s suggestions for well-designed lawn alternatives emphasize color, form, and varietal texture found in such commonplace and utilitarian flora as apple trees, fragrant basil with its African Blue blooms, and the �burnished stems, elongated leaves, and purple lacquered fruit of eggplants.� An alphabetical listing of ornamental edibles from apples to wormwood (a genus of insect-repelling plants with silvery foliage as intoxicating�visually, that is�as its putatively hallucinogenic distillate, absinthe) combined with landscaping tips for various building styles and a resources list round out a useful and inspiring volume. --Whitney Scott

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

A front yard revolution is at our fingertips and our doorsteps. Its time has come.

Walking through the ethnically diverse neighborhoods of East Los Angeles, I am always struck by the fascinating and creative ways people utilize their front yards. Some communities are dotted with front yard farms bursting with fruit trees, sugar cane, melons, brassicas, and all manner of greens in well-tended rows, along with pass-along plants from family members. The traditional front yard—the useless, boring, outdated lawn adorned by a few shade trees and perhaps some lackluster shrubbery—pales in comparison to these vibrant, productive spaces where growing food is serious business. I find these front yard farms inspirational; they speak to a resourcefulness that is long-gone in mainstream American culture, and they have a beauty all their own. Growing edibles out front is also a smart, practical choice: it takes advantage of the simple fact that wherever lawn can thrive—in places with significant amounts of sunshine—so too can herbs, fruits, and vegetables.

While record numbers of people are growing food and returning to more thoughtful land and resource use, it’s unlikely that strictly utilitarian front yard farms will be widely seen anytime soon. We still want our front yards to look like gardens. We still want the front of our house to be an inviting and livable space—an extension of ourselves and a reflection of our personal style. The challenge lies in weaving together the pieces to create a front yard that is sustainable, beautifully designed, and edible: a modern-day victory garden.

It can be done.

When I purchased my home, I promptly ripped out the front lawn and planted a garden that included such drought-tolerant plants as sages, grasses, and succulents. My blossoming as a cook followed this transformation and I slowly began integrating tough herbs (culinary sages, marjoram, and basils) and architectural edibles, like artichokes and fennel, to associate with the bold agaves that dominate my public garden. Without sacrificing my strong, sculptural planting style, I now have glorious herbs to cook with and vegetables to eat almost all year long. The creation of my successful, interesting, rewarding garden took years, but equipped with the right information, you can have it much faster than I did.
 
This book will show you how to create the new front yard: a diverse, sustainable mix of ornamentals and edibles, imaginatively designed and organically gardened. The process starts by taking a step back—looking at what inspires you—to hone in on the particular style of curb appeal you want to cultivate. Next comes the ornamental edibles: a plant palette of statement-makers and supermodels, from exotic plants, like paddle cactus, to garden standbys that you may not have realized were even edible (rose hip tea, anyone?). The shrubs, trees, and perennials in the palette of helpers (many of which are edible in their own right) will help you create a garden with year-round interest to spare. Armed with enough plants choices to fill your garden a hundred times over—and the principles of structure, repetition, form, texture, and color discussed in the design primer—the possibilities for breathtaking ornamental combinations are endless. From there, it’s reality time: look at what you have, see the lawn you want to remove, decide what you hardscape you want to build. And then take the methods in this book and do it. Get your dream garden out of your mind and into the front yard—your organic, homegrown, delicious food won’t be far behind.
The heart of this revolution goes much deeper than the visible surface. By minimizing your lawn, you are taking a stand against turfgrass as the biggest irrigated crop in America. You are saying no to something that takes precious resources without giving back anything just as precious. Growing food in your front yard is a courageous expression: you are telling people that you care about what your family eats. You are also setting an example for your neighbors. Are you the type of person who can be the standard bearer for a new kind of garden? Be bold and brave, because no matter who you are, there is a style of edible planting that will capture your imagination and suit your taste—from the wildly mixed and exuberant to the elegant and composed.

Growing food can be integrated into our daily lives. And such a fundamental change can be reflected in our front yards, for everyone to enjoy and admire. Let’s make this happen!
 

Edition details

• Publisher: Timber Pr
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1604691999
• ISBN 13: 9781604691993
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 213