Senga Lindsays spacious North Vancouver yard is very tastefully designed.
An award-winning landscape architect with a background in horticulture, she has a flair for creating beautiful, colourful and stylish outdoor spaces that can also be harvested and plated edible landscaping.
Try these, she says, standing inside the kitchen of her post-and-beam home, they are kale chips.
The kale is from her winter garden.Kale, she notes, is the ultimate bomb-proof edible in this climate.
The crunchy chips are healthy and easy to prepare, she explains. She used a dash of chili pepper, sea salt and olive oil and then puts the kale in the oven on a sheet of tinfoil.
A big proponent of healthy eating, much of the food Lindsay eats is grown in her own garden.
In the summer, her yard boasts climbing vines replete with kiwis and grapes, Columnar apple trees, fruit-bearing shrubs, pots filled with herbs, eggplants, zucchinis, assorted lettuces, tomatoes and more.
Today for lunch shes serving ratatouille, a delicious traditional French stewed vegetable dish. It will be served on a bed of quinoa the only plant that is a complete protein, she says.
Forget about the 100-mile diet. This is the 10-foot diet.
In the warm season, Lindsay can walk out to her garden and pick all the ingredients she needs for this dish right from her own edible landscape.
Now, shes sharing her 25 years of experience in landscape design and horticulture and helping others transform their outdoor spaces with her new book Edible Landscaping: Urban Food Gardens that Look Great.
Its a design book to inspire and [it] gives technical information, says Lindsay, who will be sharing tips from the book at this weeks BC Home and Garden Show.
With chapters that range from the Edible Rooftop and Herb Garden to the Community Garden, Gourmet Garden Kitchen and the Edible Wall, to name a few, she offers a plethora of different garden-style ideas for all sorts of spaces, from backyards to balconies.
Best of all, it also offers straightforward design specs, lots of pictures and valuable tips on choosing and growing veggies and fruits.
Thinking about growing lettuce? A good choice for a shady garden, Swiss chard is a designers, horticulturalists and chefs dream. In terms of pests and diseases, very little can go wrong with this vigorous cut-and-come-again plant, she writes. Vibrant white, red, yellow and even purple stalks have been bred into a variety of cultivates that you can use to accent your ornamental containers, flower border or that special culinary dish.
Before you start planting your edible landscape, she has this advice:
The biggest thing is to start small.
She always suggests starting with a four-foot by four-foot area and then you can expand.
If youve got kids, she offers tons of fun ideas in the book.
Rule of thumb is to give them some space and let them do what they want, Lindsay says.
One idea is to create a pizza garden in the shape of pie thats divided into individual slices that each offer separate growing zones for different toppings, such as Margherita tomatoes, peppers and basil.
With youngsters, she notes, it helps to give them instant growing gratification with veggies like radishes or carrots that they can crunch on right away. They get the connection that if you plant it you can eat it.
Senga Lindsay will present Seven Edible Garden Ideas to Inspire at the BC Home & Garden Show at BC Place this Sunday (Feb. 24) starting at 1 p.m. After, she will signing copies of her book and answering questions.
