Sustain-the-stain - Sustain The Stain

Food AND lawns

Aliit ori'shya tal'din

I'm very much a proponent of "food not lawns" but I'm also fucking realistic that a ton of people do not have the resources/time/energy and

Very much in agreement with this post that says that people who don't have time/spoons/resources to turn their lawns into a food garden shouldn't feel obliged to do so, and I didn't want to derail it by making this comment under the post, so I'm here making a new one of my own.

Sometimes you don't want to dig up your lawn and start market gardening because it's a fuckton of work and honestly a second job all in itself.

But what if you don't have time to do all that, but you do still want to grow at least some food?

Perennials are the way to go.

Perennials are plants that you plant once and then they just carry on growing and getting bigger without you having to do much, if anything to them.

Say you've got a small garden with a lawn and a few flower beds. What can you do to grow food without changing the format of the garden at all?

Plant a couple of fruit/nut trees. Your plum/cherry/pear/peach/whatever trees will be covered in pink blossom in the spring. Your neighbours and your local pollinators will love you.

Don't worry about the tree getting too big - plant a dwarf variety and when it reaches a height you like, prune it back to that height every year.

In your flower beds, plant

globe artichokes (very decorative, have lovely flowers and sculptural foliage.)

rhubarb (colourful edible stems.)

wild garlic (edible cloves and leaves, beautiful white star shaped flowers)

walking onions

perennial kale

chard

perennial salad plants such as Salad Burnet, Miner's lettuce etc

Jerusalem artichoke

Mashua (a perennial relative of the nasturtium - you can eat the tubers like potatoes and the leaves in salad. Has lovely red nasturtium like flowers.)

Yakon (small sunflower-like flowers, big tubers that taste faintly of pear.)

Potatoes (honestly, they have lovely white flowers and as long as you don't dig all of them up this year, more will grow next year.)

Fennel (lovely lacy edible foliage and the root is also edible.)

any other perennial plant that might grow well in your area.

Remember that all of these plants will come back every year bigger than they were the year before. You should only need to plant them once and then leave them to get on with it.

There are loads of obscure perennial vegetables and fruits you can discover with a bit of research.

I recommend How to grow Perennial Vegetables by Martin Crawford as a great book to start with. It's a huge list of edible perennials, with details of where they like to grow, what you harvest from them, potential problems, and how to cook them

Also in your flower beds, plant

fruit bushes and fruit vines on pergolas (raspberry, blueberry, goji-berry, kiwi etc)

Now you've got some vegetables, salads, nuts and fruits growing in your flowerbeds, you can think about what to do to improve your lawn.

The lawn

The great thing about getting an eco-friendly lawn is that it all involves inaction - doing less work

Stop weedkilling

Stop watering the lawn. If it survives, great! If it doesn't survive, replace with native grasses that can.

Get some native wildflower plug plants and plant them into the lawn, or

Get some native wildflower seeds and oversow the lawn with them.

This will give you a lawn full of native plants that will support your local pollinators.

Take part in No Mow May to allow your wildflowers to flower, or if you can get away with it, stop mowing altogether except for a single hay cut once a year at the peak of the flowering season.

Result

Now you have a garden where you don't need to do anything except mow once or twice a year, compost/mulch once a year, and pick the produce, and it will still look (more or less) like a normal suburban garden.

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sustain-the-stain

3 years ago