Garden Guru: Sometimes its OK to play with your food

This sand cherry bush has attractive white flowers in the spring and produces tasty cherrylike fruit all along the stems.

As spring rolls around and you get ready to plan new garden projects, take a moment to consider using edible plants as part of the landscape.

CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Gardeners tend to see the world around them in two different ways, either as a landscape or as a practical/utilitarian food-producing spot.

Some gardeners only enjoy landscape gardening, growing roses, shrubs and perennials that provide beauty. Other gardeners only grow vegetables and fruit, seeing produce as the ultimate goal of gardening.

Even those gardeners who do both still treat their landscape and food gardens discretely, as if they were separate tasks that should be done separately.

But what if we blurred the lines a bit? What if we started to see the beauty in the foods that we eat? What if we saw the food in the plants that we admire for beauty? The result is called edible landscaping.

I've been "lecturing" and writing about edible landscaping for a while now. I decided when I bought my house that has a tiny yard (25 by 120 feet) that I wouldn't grow anything that I couldn't eat.

That's when I discovered edible landscaping -- I mix the best of both worlds. You get beautiful plants that also produce delicious food. It can be fun to find new and interesting things to grow too.

So mom was wrong -- you can play with your food.

Getting started

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Garden Guru: Sometimes its OK to play with your food