2019 Edible Landscape Update

It’s been over 4 years since I started on this journey and it’s had its ups and downs. I thought I’d give everyone an update on my progress as far as my edible landscape/food forest goes. The good thing is, everything is maturing and filling out which makes it look lush and beautiful.

The Good:

• I have more asparagus than I know how to bother eating. I guess that’s good and bad… but turns out you CAN get sick of asparagus.
• The berries cascade when they start ripening, and I end up with a freezer full of frozen berries that I make into jam or compote.
• My tiny annual garden always does well with the tomatoes.
• I’ve started working on putting in edibles in my front garden.
• The saskatoon berry trees are just as beautiful and bountiful as I imagined them to be as are my blueberries.
• My goji, blackberries, raspberries, and alpine strawberries spread unbelievably quickly.
• My herbs are doing very well and my bronze perennial fennel is self seeding and spreading.
• My peach, apple, and cherries have been consistently producing.
• My ducks are still keeping all the pests at bay.
• My rhubarb is all growing beautifully.

The Bad

• The deer still come and strip certain things–like the leaves on my elderberry. I really gotta get it fenced in.
• The raspberries and thornless blackberries pop up in places I don’t want them to.
• My arctic kiwi has NOT yet started even flowering and this is the 3rd year they’ve been in the ground.
• Two of the clearance section cherry trees I put in the ground last fall died over the winter.
• My maypop did not make it this past winter.
• My Asian plums, even though they flower, haven’t fruited.
• My ostrich ferns didn’t make it through this winter.
• My hazelnuts haven’t produced either, even though they’re bushing out nicely.