Hey folks,
I’ve chatted with some gardeners who primarily grow natives and some who primarily grow veggies. Turns out, there are folks who feel they have to grow one or the other. Since diversity is one of the two top ways to help insure a healthy thriving garden (living soil being the other) I wanted to give all you gardeners out there some inspiration and ideas on how I like to grow both.
- In this first part, we’ll go into the benefits.
- The second part we’ll look at it from the veggie gardener point of view and,
- in the third part, we’ll look at it from the native gardener point of view.
3 Benefits of growing both natives and veggies:
- Diversity! Every critter that happens into or around your garden is part of the priorly connected web of garden life. Insuring you have a large diversity of plants in your garden is an insurance policy that not any one critter will wreak havoc on your entire garden. By including both a vegetable garden and some native garden beds in your landscape, you add even more diversity that if you have one or the other.
Annual Flowers, Veggies and Natives - Beauty. As I am fond of saying, “Beauty is food too”. Natives can add flowers and leaf shapes to your landscape and veggies can be grown in a pleasing manner, they don’t have to be in rows.
Mixing Food, Flowers and Natives - Food for everyone. Native gardeners tend to pride themselves on growing food for wildlife. Veggie gardeners tend to pride themselves on growing food for themselves and their families. Why not have some of both – everybody wins!
In this introduction, we took a quick look at three benefits for growing both natives and veggies.