Growing your own food can be a healthy choice for you and your family. Home gardens encourage families to eat lots of fruits and vegetables and allow people to take control over the use of pesticides in their food.
But gardening the way our parents did can be kind of, well, boring. We are loving the newer trend of creative landscape design that integrates edible plants and gardening structures.
Inspiration Green has a great article about pit greenhouses around the world. The trick to these ingenious greenhouses is that the earth helps regulate the temperatures, making them warmer in the winter and more bearable in the summer.
Buzzfeed shared a list of living wall ideas – some including edible plants. Imagine plucking your evening salad fixings off the wall on your patio! We also loved the fence that integrated planter boxes – a friendly separator between neighbors that encourages sharing the bounty and the tending.
However, our favorite idea comes from the blog of our friend Kristen. Her family built a backyard teepee covered with polebeans and sweetpeas – a sweet spot in the yard for her girls to play – with built in snacks! Be sure to read her first post about the project to get more ideas for involving kids in gardening.
From chicken coops to greenhouses, Mighty House Construction can help integrate your home’s design aesthetic into the outdoor structures of your landscape. For more ideas and inspiration, don’t miss the Sustainable Ballard Edible Garden Tour on June 29.