How to Build Edible Walls in the Garden
Most landscapes need walls to divide one area from another or for privacy. Why not get double duty from those walls by making them both decorative and productive? Here are some tips on how to build edible walls in the garden. Does this Spark an idea?
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Instructions
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First decide if you have preexisting walls you want to use or if you plan to build new walls. Edible walls can be grown from scratch as hedges, can cover hardscape (permanent walls) or can be built as something in between by covering fencing materials with edible growth.
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If you are covering existing walls or need solid walls as a foundation consider growing vines over a permanent stone, block, brick or heavy wood wall. You can attach a supporting grid work to the wall surface and grow up edibles like kiwi vines or climbing roses with their edible rose hips filled with vitamin C. Or train a fruit tree into an espalier to cover a solid wall, offer cheerful blooms in the springtime and tasty fruit for the summer.
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Try growing hedges of bay, pineapple guava, weeping mulberry, quince, dwarf fruit trees, or lower living walls of sage, blueberry, rosemary or lavender.
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You can also smother a fence with tall-growing upright plants like asparagus, anise, sunflowers, or tall tomato plants.
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Seasonal plants like peas, beans - especially pole beans - and climbing squashes, colorful climbing nasturtiums (edible flowers and seeds that can be pickled like capers), cucumbers and small melons will clamber up wire support-work or trellises on fences. Fences can easily be smothered with vining berries like blackberries and raspberries. Thorned varieties will discourage pests from bothering your wall. Choko or Choate is a perennial vine that offers fruit that tastes somewhere between a potato and a cucumber and will grow enthusiastically up a wall as will jicima.
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Other plants that are ideal to grow with some structural support to form edible walls would be grape vines and honeyberries -- the latter is a variety of honeysuckle with tasty, dark-blue berries (whereas most other honeysuckle berries are toxic to humans).
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There is a surprisingly large selection of plants that can form edible walls in the garden. Whether they grow as independently-standing dividing walls or cover supporting walls, they can provide double-duty. Either way you end up with decorative and edible walls that will be a joy in the garden and in the kitchen, too!
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Resources
- Photo Credit Photo by GardenGates
