Join Summer Rayne Oakes @FlockFingerLakes for a tour of her edible landscape garden! From fruit trees to berries, see how she nourishes her plants with _Espoma Organic_ *fertilizers* and *soils* to build healthy roots, boost blooms, and grow a bountiful harvest.
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🌿 _Timestamps:_🌿
00:00 – Intro
02:00 – Summer mentions using Espoma Organic Soils to build her garden beds
09:00 – Planting and feeding with Espoma Organic Bio-tone Starter Plus
10:20 – Feeding roses with Espoma Organic Rose-tone
17:09 – Applying Espoma Organic Soil Acidifier to blueberries
17:52 – Tomatoes in the garden (fed with Espoma Organic Tomato! Liquid Fertilizer)
31:40 – Final thoughts
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[Music] Hello. On this uh beautiful foggy morning here in the cottage gardens outside of the meadow house. We thought we’d bring you out here in the morning when the fog is thick. We don’t always get mornings like this or if we do, we’re not always up to film them. So, you’re getting kind of the tail end of a foggy morning. And today, I wanted to talk about how we’re incorporating edible landscaping into a pretty garden. So, this is a little different than like having a raised bed where you have all of your food growing, which we do have. We have certain places around flock that have our edible food. So, we have our orchard space. We have our raised beds in the gazebo area. And we also have some raised beds right outside where Peipo and Tutu, my little diamond doves, live, which will eventually be a little cabin. So, we have a couple raised beds there with asparagus and some mio ginger and some sun chokes and some ele things like that. And then we have plans for other places where there will be edible food, namely in front of this big barn over here and then also near the chicken coupe. However, this is very different because we’re incorporating food products into the landscaping. And I thought we had a good opportunity to do this really early on because this garden is only 9 months old and we could go ahead and plant some trees and shrubs and herbaceious perennials and also annuals in here before it had the chance to really grow out. Um so just to give a recap for those who haven’t tuned in before, all of this was lawn. So about 9 10 months ago, we started with the idea of taking up some of this lawn. Uh we were very thankful because Espoma Organic basically had these soil seconds. So these were uh soil, perfectly fine soil. Uh it was great because it was a little wet and it had earthworms in it already. So I feel like it was uh supercharged and they couldn’t sell it. They couldn’t sell it because it was sitting out for too long. And I said, “Hey, we would take it.” And so that is how basically the genesis of all these gardens got beefed up. Speaking of that, look at the honeybees on this Verbasum wedding candles. Let me go closer. So maybe you could hear that buzz. Yeah, they they’ve been going nuts almost every morning on this. This is for how many weeks? So floriferous. Maybe two weeks. It’s probably different flowers every day that’s blooming. Obviously, that’s great. And it’s also a benefit of planting flowers like this right next to some of your vegetables or some of your other plants that have fruit or veggie bearing. The idea was to really come in here and plant some smaller trees. So, let’s go through that first. Let’s go through kind of like the canopy layer that we’re doing all the way down to herbaceous plants. Um, there’s a lot of space here at this stage because the perennials are really just starting to to grow out and it probably will take two to three years for these perennials to grow out. So, I was like, let’s just take the opportunity to actually plant some other plants in here. But, I did want to put in some fruit trees. And you can’t tell now because, you know, maybe they just look like any other tree. But this one right here is a medlar. So, I had been introduced to Medlars when we traveled to uh Hortis Gardens in Olter County, and I just thought they were really funky little fruits. I think that they are the fruit that is called the horseiness cuz it looks so weird. And you have to let them blat. You have to let them basically pass through frost for them to be edible. But it’s kind of like an an old school medieval type of fruit. And uh I thought it was I thought it was a really cool structure to the tree. Um you know, maybe you’d see them growing in the ancient monasteries and whatnot. So I was like, that’s cool. I’d like to invest in like a a medlar. The other trees that we have in here are apples. And the apple trees that we’ve planted are not like our neighbors apples. He has like these old varieties that are probably, you know, 40, 50 feet tall and quite large. This garden really can’t handle it. So I have this apple tree right here. And this one is called a north pole. So this is a columner apple. It’ll grow maybe approximately 8 ft tall and maybe 2 to 3 feet wide. So again, if you’re short on space, this is probably a good apple variety for you to consider. And this space in general, I think, is uh really fun to work with because we’re more constrained here than we are in other places on the property. So, you know, this is 1/8 of an acre. So, we’re kind of treating it as its own contained acreage to show us what we could do on small amount of acreage. Now, here’s another one in here. And if you could, Sandre, I don’t know if you could film down in here, but you could see three big apples. And this one is white icicle. And that one we’re probably going to get to pick, I would say, in another month. And you can see right in front of it is a sunflower, a couple sunflowers that are coming up. And this is compliments of the sunflower seed that I feed the animals and uh the chipmunks kind of bury it right in there. Another fruing tree that we have that’s actually gotten quite big in size. I’m actually surprised how it’s grown. This is our sorbus or mountain ash. So, this is maybe not a fruing variety that we would typically eat, but I really wanted to attract quite a lot of birds and wildlife. And I have the belief that if you offer them other types of foods, they may leave your foods alone. That could be true or false. You might just be increasing the wildlife population dramatically. Uh here’s another one that’s really interesting. Now I was growing this plant somewhere else on the land and we had three very hard years when we were here. First one drought and then uh we had spongy moth two years and then a very um cold freeze. And I had lost this, but this is supposed to be hardy. This is a bonfire peach. And again, this is one of the ones that could grow in a container on your patio if you wanted it to. So, this one is now in the ground, and I’m hoping that we have a gentle enough winter that this actually is able to establish. I planted it in the fall, I think, a couple years ago, and I planted this in the spring now, so it’s going to have time to settle in and to grow its roots. Um, actually, I have what? All the spiderw webs on the fence. Oh, yeah. Crazy. Well, I don’t know if you can see it or not. I I Well, I definitely can see it. Now, here is some other trees that we have here. Now, I just set another set of fence behind this because these were getting eaten off and from the other side by the deer. So, I need to train this down. And you could see, I mean, I was just out here two weeks ago. Look at how much these have grown. So, I’m going to clip these off close because this needs um this needs training. And as soon as it gets to maybe three to four little sections, I need to start training it here because otherwise it’s going to lose its shape. You can see that there’s a fruit set starting right there. Now, this was like Liberty Freedom and I can’t remember the other one, but I have to come out here and train this one. So, I have two Espalier apples here, which again, short on space. Espaling your apple trees is or your pear trees or whatever it is that you’re growing is another great way to save on space. Right behind Sonder, we have another columner apple. This one is relatively new. This one’s called Blushing Delight. So, this one is again growing up. It’s right up against this area. So, it’s not going to be a spalade, but it’s not going to take up any more width than this over here, which is pretty wonderful. And then you’ll see that I have another one right here. And this is called Tasty Red. And I want to come out here and actually fertilize everybody today as well, which I’m going to be doing shortly. I’m going to do some Biotone on the apples. And Biotone is a really great general organic fertilizer. And I usually put this right in my beds, right in the beginning, incorporating it into any of the soil that I’m using. So, it’s equipped with helpful bacteria. And if you’re interested in organic gardening, then this is perfect. [Music] [Music] rose tone. basically is a 432. So, it has quite a bit of nitrogen and quite a bit of phosphorus as well. NPNK, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium. And the phosphorus actually helps with the the bloom boosting. This one’s starting to bloom again, which is really lovely to see right next to some sunflowers that have been planted. [Music] Try not to get it on the leaves. Just get around in the root zone. [Music] Now, in here is where we had a big windstorm. Actually, tornado had come through um in the towns next door. Luckily, it didn’t hit us. But I did actually cut back here at some point. But you could see how all these dog bans just basically fell over. So, I got to have to figure out what to do here. But if you pull this back where I had cut, you’ll see that I was training some raspberries up here. So this is one of the raspberries. You can see it’s kind of poking out for the light. So if I could come in here, cordon off. Again, I I want to install a fence here that will keep these back and then keep this open because it’s uh challenging once these start to grow as you could see. So I have two raspberries actually planted back there. Um, again, it’s going to be challenging. It depends on how we want to use this. And if those raspberries, if we forget about them and it turns out to be animal food, then so be it. But this is just some of the ways that I’m growing the edible landscaping here. When I grew up, we would uh grow raspberries in like big bush bushes. But as I saw other growers, as I aged and I saw other growers growing them on fences and everything like that and kind of flattening them out, I realized that that is pretty sensible because the plant gets more light and you could actually grab the raspberries more easily from either side of the fence. So grow going up here just to I wanted to kind of stay on the trees, but because we’re right here, Egyptian walking onions. Again, this is something that I had seen at Hortice. they were growing it and I got um some selects from them. This is how I got my Egyptian walking onions. This we were growing up in our memorial garden and then I decided to grow it down here because I wanted something wild and wacky especially next to this triscantia because it to me it has similar growth patterns. But this is an onion like a green onion that you could eat. It tastes just like any other onion. It’s It’s about as big as it is, but kind of like a garlic. It’s kind of like a garlic or onion. Onion. Well, they’re all in the same family. And it’s called a Egyptian walking onion because you could see it starts to lay down and then these start to root and you planted it here, but eventually it walks around your land. So, plants have interesting ways of getting a around. Um, we think of them as cesile creatures, but they really are not. They have figured out ways to kind of move. Um, now there’s quite a bit of weeds growing in here as well. I have to come out here and weed, but I decided to plant some purple basil, and you’ll see that I’ve planted it all throughout. So, it’s the one herb that I’m not growing on our patio, which I’ll show you the patio plants shortly. But I just think it’s so beautiful that we started to plant that in the landscape. In cottage gardens, you often see front of border plants, maybe like uh lettuce and kale and things of that nature. And we have a lot of space in this garden because I planted roodendrrons and aelas and they’re small. So, I was like, well, what else am I going to plant? So, I started planting kale. And you’ll see that I didn’t get out here in time to cover it. It was not being eaten by our groundhogs or bunnies for quite some time. And then it’s all of a sudden they discovered it. And I was like, I better cover this. And you could see the growth on it now. But I wanted to grow it also because it was so beautiful. But if you don’t cover it, you could see what happens to it. And and you get um snails and slugs and everything else that’s on it. So, I covered this so that we could, you know, if we want to have a kale salad or anything, we could come out here and Yeah. Absolutely destroyed it. Yeah. But I think that’s also bunny. And um the other thing that Sandra just stepped on is this uh new new bush that we have here. And it got probably a little sunburned um or hit by we had a hail storm at 77 degrees and we had dimesiz hail. It’s been kind of a crazy year. Um, but this is a blueberry that is relatively new that we’ve planted in. And then we have a couple more um, basil. We have uh, Tulsi basil and purple basil right here that’s kind of growing as well. So, you’ll see that growing. And then this is rhubarb. I grew up with rhubarb. And these get massively big leaves. And I think it’s a really beautiful plant from an ornamental standpoint. Even the flowers are beautiful. Most of the time people will cut off the flowers because it essentially the energy goes into the flowers and not really the crop which is the stock. But I figured I would grow this here and it would probably shade the ground and that could look really nice. Down here, I was hopeful to plant some beautiful red cabbage and I added the cloches because you could see that it was eaten off. And red cabbage, I think, is just such an attractive plant. It’s a great part of um an edible landscape if you could get it to grow without anything. And I just see a bunny in the distance um eating. He just he just went this way behind the yucka. He was in the garden this morning. I came out and he was here munching away. And so, normally they just eat the grass, but yeah. So, here’s some of our blueberries. We actually uh planted two more blueberry bushes here. And they actually did have blueberries on, but Sandre and I saw the other morning that there was a groundhog literally standing up in on his hind honches pulling the blueberries, the fresh blueberries off of this. So, if you don’t get out here as soon as possible, um, or you don’t cordon it off, which this is another way we have these to kind of cordon off the bushes if they’re getting eaten or anything, we could just dump that over the bush. Um, but we have a lot of animals here that like to indulge in the edible landscaping as well. Here’s another blueberry bush. Um, I’m going to put a soil acidifier on this today as well, just to kind of uh keep it happy. This is one of our bush beans. And I think these again are really beautiful and delightful. The trifoliate leaf leaflets. And look at that tiny little flower. Super pretty. And they don’t take up a lot of space. I mean, obviously you could get uh trellising beans. In this case, this is a bush bean. Pineapple sage right here, which again has a beautiful red flower, and you could plant that in mass. It is not a hearty perennial unfortunately. So, uh you have to plant it and then it goes away. Same with the beans and the tomatoes. Here we’re in a zone 56. So, a lot of these are not hardy. I had some extra tomatoes and because of that I said, well, why not plant them here? I have the space. This garden is yet to actually fill out. So, you could see that this one is ready to be picked today. And I have another one here which is starting to get some beautiful green fruits. And I think this is like the sunold varieties. And then right down here you could see that we have a sambucus lace. Now those really don’t develop as many fruits. I think I find them to be really beautiful. But I do have another lace leaf elderberry that I will uh show you. And it’s nice to have them kind of close together so that they cross-pollinate. Here I’ve noticed that there’s a weed that moved in. And this one is called pineapple weed, which is a nice little herb. So this might be something one of the ones that even though I didn’t plant it, I would probably keep it. I mean, it’s pretty amazing. Crush that in your fingers, smell that. Smells just like pineapple. It’s in the chamomile family. Yeah, I can smell that. It’s similar. Yeah. Now, this is something I got to come out here and fertilize as well. I got to fertilize my roses. I’ve been saying that. This these petals are just falling out. But this is a flower and I think it’s called apricot delight. And the petals are actually edible. It has a faint apricot smell. And okay, this is not something that’s going to fill you up, but it’s going to be delightful for maybe on top of a salad. So, this one I’ve noticed has a bit more trouble on its leaves. Like it’s it’s getting these brown spots, although I it doesn’t look like black spot to me. Whereas this one, you could see, which is pear. It tastes more like pear and smells more like pear. uh has a better ability to be able to fight off whatever that guy is going through. So, um again, that’s another kind of novelty, I guess, that I planted in the garden because I wanted to plant roses in with some of the other herbaceous perennials and the fact that they have some of these edible blooms that are quite tasty and I’ve tasted them. Um I thought that was a just really nice novel edible plant that also looks really good. over here. You could see that I’ve planted a bit more with the basil, the purple basil. So, that will likely start to spread. And then, let’s actually walk over a bit more to the fence line. You could see how much we’re just like fitting in this one little space. And we’re not even devoting this all to food. And there’s so much more that we could fit. But over here, we have a couple things. One is we have a hyasin bean and again I think this is a really beautiful plant. It gets these again trifoliate leaves. It’s uh got a purplish tinge and these hyasin beans are the the flowers as well as the seed pods are just this beautiful kind of burgundy purplish red color. So this is another great one that I could train onto the fence. utilize that fence line and then uh have a crop afterwards. Same thing here. I have this lace. This is a sambukas lionata and this is a lacy elderberry. And this one, unlike the other one, does have a tendency to flower and fruit. And this is a new acquisition. And I really wanted something that was quite delicate because eventually these will be more like bushier out here. So, this is one that uh I have and I have some other herbs that I’ve planted and dotted throughout here. Um this doesn’t look like much right now, but hopefully it will come back in like two to three years. So, a lot of these are the tulips that were the tulips and the kamassia as well. Um and the kamassia is an edible plant. It’s not one that I would recommend. And I kind of feel like it’s maybe something in more famine times, but I did plant some of our native kamassia up top. Um, and you could use the bulb as an edible basically tuber essentially. Now, I also planted in some corn here because I had it and I said, well, maybe I’ll stick some corn kernels in. And so, I have four growing up here. I thought I had planted maybe six, but maybe only four took. and we’ll see. You know, it’s again, you get these tall stocks. Um I did plant a purple corn as well, but I don’t know if that one has come up or gotten eaten. Uh so it that’s another benefit of maybe starting them early on and then planting them in because you know you’re actually physically planting in plants. Whereas if you do a seed or a kernel or a bean, you might not know whether it takes or if some animal digs it up and eats it. I see some sunflowers actually planted in here as well. Look at this one. So, these sunflowers right here are going to be coming up whether I like it or not. But it’s great because then I didn’t plant them. Actually, our neighbor comes out and gives sunflower seeds to us and all the other neighbors on the street because she really loves to see sunflowers growing. And um we don’t usually typically plant them, but uh we give them to our chipmunks and they plant them for us. And then here we go. This is a this is a sweet pea. Uh this is a beautiful variety. I think this one is called Monty Dawn. Um I had planted another one up on our raised bed near the meadow house, but unfortunately it got dug up by um an animal. I think a groundhog. I actually saw the groundhog in there the other day and I scared him and he was like he peakedked out from the planters. I actually have a funny photo. I’ll throw that up on the screen. And then here’s another thing that we have currants. Now this is called rebase alpinum and this is alpine currant. This one is hardy to like -50° I think Fahrenheit. So this could get really really cold. And uh I have another one. I think it’s uh rebase Nevada neadence. But this one uh gets beautiful nice red berries. It’s not maybe the a a currant that I would eat, but animals will eat it. I have many of our edible currants more up in our orchard. And the only thing that makes them a bit more edible is that they’re just tastier. I just want to point out this poppy because not all the poppies, somebody had been eating the poppy’s heads, but this one is called um I think Lauren’s grape, which is a really beautiful color. And you could see earlier in the year I planted dalas and these are the dalas coming up against the fence line. So these should get a bit taller and I wanted to train them along the fence line so they didn’t like flop over. One thing I missed tree-wise maybe a couple things is this is a weeping morris. Uh so this is a mulberry and actually I picked off a few fruits. So, we had just planted it this year. I want to plant a little bit more mulberries on the property because I think they’re just such delicious fruits. The type of fruits that you pick and your hands get all black and purple. And uh there is such a beautiful form of the weeping mulberry when we were at the eco village in Ithaca. If you recall, we actually went into the lady’s land in the property just to see her mulberry because it was covered in mulberries and it was just this beautiful dome. So, I’ve uh planted a couple of these on the land. And then this right here is witch hazel. So, we have witch hazel naturally growing in our environment, but this is a great medicinal as well. Let’s go over here because I’m sure we have some other interesting things that we’ve planted. So, this over here is another rebase. Uh this is a another current. And I just really love the shape of it. I love the shape of the leaf. Um, sometimes they have some really beautiful uh flower colors as well and other times the flowers are a bit more inconspicuous. So, it depends on the the variety that you get. But I wanted to plant this in here as a bit more of a shadier garden. It does get quite a lot of light during the morning hours if the the light is heavy because we have this is eastern facing. But it’s um going to be quite a delightful garden as it starts to grow out. I did also plant some strawberries in here. Um right here you can see. And so these will naturally start to spread. All you need to do is really plant a a couple and they start to spread over time. And they are really delightful to pick. Now, if we go up here onto the patio, you’ll see that this is the place where I concentrated on planting the most herbs. Um, pelgonium sedoides. This is actually a great medicinal. Um, people will collect it as an expectctorant or uh for coughs. Some more strawberries. Um, this one is a bushing strawberry, however. So, this is our Faria Vesca. And then you could see that our netoriums have taken uh lovely. So I had planted some small netoriums and you could grab the leaves and the flowers and they are both edible. Kind of spicy and peppery. Let’s make sure there’s no bugs in there. There is. Sorry about that. So, these would be great on top of like um salads and stuff, just decorating them. And it’s got a really nice peppery taste to it. Oh, and look at this. A rose that I would not eat, but somebody else did. Earlier this year, we had buds down here that got eaten, but now you can see that this one has developed a bud. That is just so exciting because I was You were worried that this one would stop doing anything, right? Well, I was bummed because somebody early in the year ate the flower buds down here. Same with that buff beauty. So, I’m maybe maybe that buff beauty is going to revive. Well, I should has to grow taller. It has to grow taller. Yeah. And and I did see So, you see this got dug out there’s back there. There’s a little hole back here. And the the small baby chubby, the little groundhog, came up here the other day thinking I think he thinks he’s going to live in here because he and he now has to find a new home because he got kicked out of the house. So, you could see that they’re desperate for places to live. So, yeah. So, this is exciting to see because I I’m going to do a rose tone on this uh today because I really want to see these flowers bloom very nicely. And then also right behind Sonder, I have this gorgeous huckleberry that you can see got planted in with some sunflower seeds, compliments of our chippy. Lots of sunflower seeds. And this this hasn’t I just planted this this year, so I’ll probably do a little bit more soil acidifier in this since it’s in a pot. And then you have um our chives and thyme, which is spread out really nicely. And then oregano. And for whatever reason, chipmunks have not dug into this, which is pretty good. Here we go. We have some parsley. And we have some cilantro. cilantro is already kind of bolted and it didn’t really last that long. So, I would probably plant it again, maybe more of them. And then look at our beautiful strawberries now because we started growing this in a pot. For whatever reason, these are maturing a lot later and I have seen animals eat these out here, which I’ve been happy to oblige to. We had a really beautiful strawberry crop this year up uh towards our gazebo where we’ve planted it and we also have a good crop in our orchard, but we don’t usually get out there in the orchard. So, yeah. So, these are just some of the ideas of edible landscaping. I definitely want to do more of this and I think I just really took on the opportunity because there’s so much space in the garden at this um at this point in time because the perennials are just starting to take shape. Next year, I think the garden won’t be as billowed out either. And we could plant, we could plug in some um tomatoes and some cabbage and some broccoli and maybe right in the beginning put some cloches over them so the animals don’t eat them. And that way when we come out, we could just actually take off the cloch and enjoy the the vegetables or the fruits that we’re growing. And I think other things that I’d like to try maybe are artichokes because I think they’re just so beautiful with a thistle-like flower and maybe plug those in and incorporate that um along the fence line as well. There’s a lot of things that we could do, but for now, these are some of our ideas um and incorporating edible landscaping. And we’ll probably just continue to do more of it. I really like how it looks in with the rest of the garden. And now I’m going to get busy fertilizing some of our plants. That be thought that was a real plant. [Music]
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