Build Your Edible Landscape

Spring is here and to many there is nothing more hopeful than designing and planting a garden. There are some who have no time to tend an annual vegetable garden, but not to worry, we have a solution for you. Plant perennial edibles in your spaces, they are most often a lower maintenance option for homegrown food that can integrate well with other features of your outdoor space.

Nanabush Food Forests and Forêt Capitale Forest both create and steward food forests and integrate food-bearing trees into their projects. At the Forêt Capitale Forest Base of Operations (at the Just Food Community Farm in Blackburn Hamlet, 2391 Pepin Court), they have demonstration “lawn conversion” examples, to give visitors ideas of what they could do in lawn-sized spaces.

If you are coming to Seedling Saturday on May 10th, we encourage you to take a leisurely stroll to see these demonstration gardens. If you are interested in ‘recreating’ them in your space, both Nanabush Food Forests and Forêt Capitale Forest will have trees and shrubs for sale as a fundraiser, and you can take home a ‘edible landscape kit’.

The 2 metre by 2 metre square kit reproduces the smallest of the demonstration lawn conversion examples you can see on your tour, and includes a hardy peach seedling, currant bushes, elderberry, chives, and rhubarb. We hope you can make it out to the event. If you can not, you can still purchase tree stock from this site and make alternate arrangements for pickup (typically Wednesdays from 4pm-6pm). Happy Spring!