Have you removed all grass from your front yard & replaced with plants
21 days ago
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- 17 days ago
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Replacing all front-yard landscaping with edibles in SE Va.
Comments (7)I'm in the process of gradually doing the same thing in my Northern VA front yard. Your ideas sound like an excellent start. There is a very good Edible Landscaping nursery in Afton, VA near Charlottesville - not too close to you, but likely a reasonably day trip. They are at http://www.ediblelandscapin.com - they do mail order, but if you go yourself you can hand select your plants, save on shipping, and draw on the extensive knowledge of the owner (at least during the week). For fruit trees it depends on what you like to eat the most. Most varieties are available on dwarf root stock, which you should be able to space 8-10' apart. I planted Lingonberry and Wintergreen between my blueberry bushes - they grow slowly, but make pretty groundcover year round, happy in some shade as an understory plant, and are edible, too! I'm also interested in trying some wild ginger, which is native, though I don't have it yet. You can get bush cherries, and bush varieties of filberts (non-native), both grow into fairly large shrubs. Artichokes die back in the winter, but are very attractive in the warmer months, and are perennials you can grow from seed. There are also hardy kiwis which grow on thick, sturdy vines (similar to wisteria, but they don't grab on as aggressively). They take a fair bit of space, heavy pruning, and at least 1 male plant to pollinate up to 5-6 females. I prefer their small, smooth-skinned fruits over the hairy ones in the grocery stores. They fruit prolifically, and yield kiwis the size of large grapes - you can just pop them in your mouth without peeling! So far in my yard I have Sunshine Blue blueberries (tolerate less acidic soil than most blueberries), Hosui Asian pear, a non-astringent Asian persimmon (Shenko?), a contorted filbert, and a bush filbert (don't recall the variety) in my front yard. I will add another small tree (Asian pear or sour cherry, I think), and a pair of hardy kiwi. I'll also start new Artichokes - I let the ones I planted in 2007 get overgrown with grass, and they didn't survive last winter. Sorry for the lengthy post - I hope it helps a bit! Enjoy your project. -Leah...See MoreNeed opinion about removing Arborvitea from front yard
Comments (18)"Foundation plantings" are a landscape design convention held over from Victorian times when shielding or disguising bare stone or concrete foundations was popular/necessary and popular landscape architects of that time promoted the idea of 'grounding' the house to the landscape for a more natural look. Like the omnipresent lawn, they may or may not have relevance to today's landscapes. And it is a matter almost entirely of personal taste. Certainly lot sizes have shrunk significantly over the years so that the beds that defined a foundation planting are now so tight and restricted that almost nothing other than annuals and a few perennials fit. That appears to be the case in at least part of the OP's garden, where the concrete walkway only allows a very narrow space for any sort of planting bed. But if the foundation bed is designed to be generously deep enough (a 6' minimum - deeper is better) then it allows for planting some evergreen material (mixed with deciduous if desired) to compliment the house and welcome visitors, provided that it is of proper scale. And if well-designed and with proper consideration to plant selection, foundation plantings pose no issue to either the structure or the foundation. btw, the design lingo now popular for this front of the house planting is 'the entry garden' :-)...See Morehaving problems figuring out what to plant in my front yard for a tree
Comments (11)Before I'd make that ^ pronouncement, I'd question OP about what is meant by a 25 ft. limit in size. I'm about as sure as a guy at a computer at a remote location can be that what he/she means is that the yard section or whatever little plot this is is 25 ft. wide. That simply does not say anything about what tree can or can't "fit" that spot. Remember dear readers....large-growing "shade tree"-type trees, when mature, exist as a trunk somewhere out in the yard. The trunk may grow large, but no tree I'm aware of in the N. temperate zone is going to have a trunk 25 ft. wide. What is almost surely the case is that any large-growing "shade tree"-type tree could in fact easily inhabit that space...and at maturity, would consist of a trunk with all the tree up high overhead. Such trees form living ceilings over our "outdoor rooms" which is what landscaping seeks to provide. Take that same 25 ft. wide area, plant one of the ornamental, low-crowning species, and now you really have taken up all that space. Nobody can throw a ball around, nobody can even just walk there, because there's a big, wide-spreading ornamental tree crown in the way. That's the reality of this big tree/small tree conundrum-that many folks get it exactly backwards-the large-growing type-at maturity-taking up less space than the little redbud, fl. crab, or what have you. People that give out lots of landscape advice should learn to recognize this elemental fact....See MoreIs it possible to have all these giant conifers in the front yard?
Comments (19)There comes a time when offering advice that one reaches a point of diminishing returns...........we may be approaching that point ;-) Planning ahead is great and is often a very wise thing to do. But determinedly holding on to some preconceived notion of how your life will be 30, 40 or 50 years down the road is unrealistic. Life happens.......and you need to learn how to roll with the punches and be flexible. Heruga is young and relatively inexperienced but has expressed an interest in pursuing horticulture as a career. And his passion for plants is obvious. But as an "old" gardener with decades of personal and professional gardening under my belt and lifetime full of life experiences, I can safely and assuredly make these observations: As your gardening/horticultural knowledge increases, your taste in plants will change. You cannot fully plot out what your road in life will be. Professions and job opportunities may change. You may wind up working in Texas. Or Florida. Or South America or Timbuktu. Statistics indicate that chances are VERY high that you will not live in the same house all your life, let alone the same general location. Preplanning to such detail now excludes the input one would expect from whomever may share your life. A life partner may have very strong feelings on the suitability of a particular house. Or location. Or may have career requirements of their own that will need to be addressed. And what about the possibility of a family? Kids will have their own requirements that will need to be addressed, both with a house and any landscape. And excluding all of these issues, there are just matters of practicality that are being overlooked. The resale value of a house with a garden crammed full of giant conifers. And with little care for the actual design. The difficulty of growing what will want to be large conifers in containers indefinitely. The future cost of the "perfect" property to accommodate the plant collection (keeping in mind the income a horticultural professional can expect). I could go on, but hopefully Heruga will get the point. I respect his interest and enthusiasm and don't care to dampen that. But at this point in time, I don't think he is thinking very realistically about the future.........time will tell! jumping off the soapbox.................See More- 17 days ago
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