Plant a Perennial ‘Backbone’ for Your Vegetable Garden

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Elderberries, gooseberries, blueberries, raspberries, black currants, boysenberries and rose hips are great, colorful fruits to grow in your garden.
Elderberries, gooseberries, blueberries, raspberries, black currants, boysenberries and rose hips are great, colorful fruits to grow in your garden.
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Rosemary, mint and fennel will also make great additions to your beautiful garden landscape.
Rosemary, mint and fennel will also make great additions to your beautiful garden landscape.
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Make beneficial wildlife part of your food-garden ecosystem with “The Wildlife-Friendly Vegetable Gardener” by Tammi Hartung.
Make beneficial wildlife part of your food-garden ecosystem with “The Wildlife-Friendly Vegetable Gardener” by Tammi Hartung.

Enhance your relationship with nature.In The Wildlife-Friendly Vegetable Gardener (Storey Publishing, 2014), author Tammi Hartung provides all of the tips and tricks to making a garden a peaceful place where perennials attract pollinators, ponds house slug-eating bullfrogs and hedgerows shelter and feed many kinds of wildlife. This excerpt, which is from Chapter 3, “Garden Elements That Welcome Wildlife,” discusses the benefits of adding perennials to your garden landscape.

Buy this book from the MOTHER EARTH NEWS store: The Wildlife-Friendly Vegetable Gardener.

A great many trees, shrubs, vines, hedgerows, vegetables, and herbs can serve the garden landscape as backbone plants, establishing a multistory environment that creates microclimates and habitats. They set the stage by welcoming birds, beneficial insects, earthworms, garter snakes, and toads to make their homes and raise their young in and near the food garden.

Trees and shrubs flower before yielding their delicious harvest of nuts, fruits, and berries; the flowers provide fodder for many types of pollinators, including mason bees, honeybees, butterflies, and moths. Berry bushes and asparagus can provide wind protection for more tender plants such as tomatoes and peppers, or midsummer shade for lettuces. The list of perennial food plants is quite long, so you have great variety of choice in what to include in your garden. Keep in mind that you must choose your perennial plants — and their place in the garden — with care. Although you can relocate a rhubarb plant or asparagus patch, it’s a lot more work than planting tomatoes in a different spot.

Create a Perennial “Backbone” for Your Vegetable Garden

  • Published on Apr 15, 2015
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