Help Your Own Economy
Fresh Backyard Food
Let us bring a miniature Farmer’s Market to your backyard.
What do you want your vegetable and fruit garden to look like?
Do you want to feel like you’re on a small farm, or mix your fruit trees and vegetables in with a more conventional landscape?
Do you want flowers mixed in with your veges for bouquets and to attract pollinators?
How about herbs for flavor and medicinal remedies?
We can build vegetable beds in a variety of shapes, sizes, and materials.
Click on any of the pictures below to see a larger version. Move your mouse over the larger picture to see the slideshow navigation buttons.
Fruit trees can be ornamental too
This is the way a fruit tree can also be an ornamental tree, pruned in an artful way. The rosy yellow plums are prolific and melt in your mouth!
Well-pruned and beautiful apple trees in West Oakland. These trees live between a sidewalk and a driveway.
You can have beauty and food anywhere!
A Pineapple Guava tree, Feijoa sellowiana , has delicious flower petals as well as interesting flavor in fruit, and is a beautiful ornamental shrub that can also grow into a tree.
An elderberry tree that decided to live here, most welcome and valuable for the local wildlife and hopefully good eating as well!
A persimmon tree in a Trestle Glen neighborhood on the left and apricot on the right, protected from deer!
A Fuji apple tree.
In this garden in Montclair, there are many fruit trees, and raspberries. Apples, persimmons, lemons, lime, grapefruit, orange, loquat, avacado and this fig.
This Hachiya persimmon tree in South Berkeley is living well among the drought tolerant plants in a front yard. These replace a slice of lawn that didn't turn people's heads like these flowers!
We took out part of the lawn in Rockridge to have a planting bed for the persimmon and lemon trees, and a sitting place for the bench. We used rocks that came from a pile in another planting bed that were in the way of planting! We also sheet-mulched before putting the mulch down to lessen the likelihood of grass growing here.
This is from the SF Flower and Garden show. This is an easier and healthier way to get rid of your lawn. When we dig up a lawn, we take valuable top soil with the sod. When a lawn is sheet mulched instead, the breakdown of the sod and cardboard or newspapers feeds the soil as the worms and microbes break it down. From left to right: lawn, cardboard for sheet mulching, newspapers (another way to sheet mulch), shredded bark mulch or leaves, straw, soil, bark in the pathway next to the mounded vegetable edible flower, herb bed.
Add a bed for food growing amongst your other ornamentals
This is a pot from a collection that the client found. They have a young child who was eager to pick food from their patio decorations! This is a mixture of herbs, veges, and strawberries.
A raised bed using sustainably grown and harvested redwood. The client asked for a rim to be able to lay down tools or pots. Another design could be having the rim hanging over more to the outside of the box.
Or just turn your whole yard into food production!
This is where my client's dreams of growing an urban farm will come true! Sheet mulching to get rid of weeds, amending the soil on top of the cardboard, then adding mulch to help the cardboard break down, building a retaining wall for the 2 different levels, then plant!! Fruit trees, artichokes, blueberries, veges.
This shows the 2 different levels where we will build a wall, and plant the fruit trees above.
A beautiful and efficient compost bin will be built to the left of the gate. So important to create our own rich soil by keeping plant trimmings and prunings on site. A native blackberry is being kept safe on the other side of the fence.
A 12,000 sq ft backyard on the Bay Friendly Garden Tour '09. How would you like to feed yourself, your family, bees, butterflies, birds on this beauty?
Another view of the 12,000 sq ft garden. A shaded outdoor sitting space under the arbor. The straw is protecting the beds from weeds and soil runoff until they can be planted. One way to overwinter unused garden space.
