Ep. 257 Design principles and plants for edible landscapes | #GoodGrowing

Welcome to the Good Growing podcast. I am Chris Enroth, horticulture educator with University of Illinois Extension coming at you from Macomb, Illinois, and we have got a great show for you today. I am hungry, but I also like looking at pretty things. We're gonna be talking about edible landscaping plants, do a little bit of emphasis on native ones, but you know what? If it looks good and I can eat it, well, it's going to my yard.

And so we're we're gonna dive right into that. And you know I'm not doing this by myself. I'm joined as always every single week by horticulture educators Ken Johnson in Jacksonville, Illinois and Emily Swihart in Milan, Illinois. Ken, Emily, hello.

Hello. How are you?

Hi, Chris. Good.

I'm just gonna change up these intros every week. We're gonna do something different every time. Keep your own to

go individually. We can't share this via Zoom. It's too awkward.

I know.

Yep. I I've kinda figured that out over the years, like, in the whole interview podcast process, you have to be very direct because we're not sitting in the same room as each other. So we have to, like, figure out without necessarily body language who's supposed to talk and when.

So The eye contact is missing because of the the screen.

Mhmm. Exactly.

Embrace the awkward silence.

We cut most of those out for you, folks. Oh, well, Emily, you brought this topic to us today. So can you just maybe just get us started in, what are we talking about again? The the main theme of this show today?

Yeah. I would love to. Yes. I I kinda suggested this a while ago. I had listened to an interview kind of on the subject, and and the term that I learned is called edimentals.

It's a merging of ornamental and edible. And I just thought that this concept was really intriguing. You know, and in practice, that is what you're trying to do in your landscape. You're trying to create a landscape that is both beautiful, and of course, that kind of applies to, your unique individual definition of what ornamental is or what an aesthetic vibe you're going for, while also making conscious choices to grow food, to grow plants that produce some part of them that can be consumed. Now whether you do that or not is up to you also on kind of lifestyle, and we could talk about where it gets even more complicated.

But that's at the heart of it. We're just blending a landscape that we traditionally have separate. We traditionally have, you know, a vegetable garden or a orchard kind of somewhere in the yard, and then we have a separate, more ornamental landscape. This is this is merging the two, and there's a lot of intriguing reasons to why you could do that. I just was appealing you know, I I've mentioned on the podcast before I have I'm blessed with some space in my yard, so I don't have to merge them.

I'm just fascinated by it. Not everybody has, you know, a whole bunch of different spaces they can parse out in that landscape, and so why not make your food garden beautiful and your beautiful garden edible?

And just to be clear, we are we're talking more about cultivating these plants. This is not a foraging episode, which is a fascinating topic, but but kind of the difference between these two is like foraging is you're coming upon like a wild plant, which requires, you know, proper identification of that particular plant and kind of knowing a little bit of the history of the plant, knowing how many dogs were walked in this area, what are they spraying in this area. Whereas with your cultivating this, you have intentionally planted it, which then makes that identification easier because you know what, you know, would most likely be growing in that spot. You would have known what has been sprayed by a human or a dog on that spot. And and so that's kind of the difference that we're talking about today.

So we're not talking about foraging. This is more of a a cultivation of edible landscaping.

Yeah. I think that's a really important distinction. Also, if you're foraging, you should have permission. Oftentimes, if you're going onto private lands or into, like, wild spaces, we need to have permission to collect plants from those spaces. And so yeah.

So we were going to just kind of share some of the edible plants in our landscape eventually. So, like, that's a teaser for what's coming. We're going to talk about some of the plants that we either know are edible in our landscape and are growing in our ornamental spaces. But I don't want to get there quite yet. I want to kind of go through the principles of an edible ornamental landscape, if that's all right with you guys.

There's kind of like four ish. And then I'll warn our viewers and listeners, there's a lot of caveats with this. And so you'll hear some of those along the way. It's like, well, this is how you could define it, but there's also options B, C, D, and E if you want to go with that route too. I feel like this is a really malleable kind of gardening style.

All right. So we're going to go through just some of the principles of what this kind of flexible, malleable landscape design style means. All right? So everyone can kind of shape it how they want, but these are the guiding principles around it. First, it is a blending of both beauty and productivity.

So traditionally, we'll be selecting plants for a visual quality. We'll like them for a certain flower color or a size or a shape. There's different aesthetic qualities we choose plants for. We're doing that, and we're considering how it's going to produce for us. Like what it's going to produce, maybe how much of something it's going to produce.

And so there's those two. There's beauty and productivity, both being priorities for a plant selection. There's also an emphasis on perennial plants with this garden design style for the sustainability of it. We are trying to choose plants and create a landscape that is almost self sustaining, is the idea of it. Like in your ornamental garden, you oftentimes are having perennials.

And there's a variety of different perennials we can choose. But the emphasis is still on having perennial plants in this edimental landscape. And just like in a traditional ornamental bed, you can supplement with fillers. And I've heard it described as like dot plants. And so these could be your annuals or your traditional beautiful annual vegetables.

I'm thinking of some of our ornamental kales. There's a variety of traditional annual garden plants that are also really beautiful. And so those get put into the landscape, but they're not the primary focus. Probably 55% to 10% of your landscape would be those. And then there's an emphasis on diversity.

And so as I was doing reading, and this makes a lot of sense, like we say it all the time, right plant, right place. It applies here too, especially since we're doing perennials, right? We want to make sure these plants are going to thrive in the locations we're putting them. So we are selecting the right plant for the right place, with an emphasis on a lot of different species in the landscape. Because then you'll have a lot of flavors.

You'll have a lot of diversity of nutrition. If you're eating out of your landscape and you have a variety of foods you're eating, you're going to have diversity in your nutrition. You're going to have diversity in the seasonality of the plants, like when they're being harvested. Some are early spring, some are to be midsummer, some are late fall. There's a diversity of harvest intervals.

And so having a lot of different plant species is going to likely provide that for you. So that's number three. And then finally, the principles of design still apply. And so when you are organizing a landscape like this, we're still going to be talking about repetition, and pattern, and texture, and form, and scale. All of these things are still going to come into consideration when you're planning an edimental landscape.

It is just that you have additional considerations as well. So those are kind of the four that I sussed out when I was doing the research. Do you guys have anything to add to it or thoughts on those kind of four different criteria?

You know, Emily, as you were speaking, what keeps coming to mind was the what was kind of instructed into our brains was the form and function thing in school. It is that, whenever we would present our designs to our class or a committee or whatever, we had to defend the placement of everything every plant, every sculpture, every component. And the idea is that, you know, it's not just about necessarily, like, having something that you like or something that is pretty. There has to be a function behind it, whether it is edible or whether it has, you know, good storm water management qualities. You know, there's and function, and it had to be both.

We had to be able to defend everything. And as you're describing this, having both beauty, productivity, having that all fits the bill for us here. So you can defend every plant that you put in your yard now if it's both pretty and edible.

Yeah. No. I thought that same thing too. Like, was like, this feels like coming home. This is how we were trained.

And I was like, oh, this makes so much sense. Like, why you know, and it's cultural. Right? Like, I was raised with a vegetable garden over there and the ornamental garden's over here. Like, I think it's cultural for us.

But yeah, I agree. I was just like, oh, this honestly, form follows function is how I have always thought about things. Right? That kind of like, needs to function first. And so then you can start adding in those design pieces.

Well, with edimentals, it is not without challenge. Also, know, some of it is just like changing the way we're thinking. And I do want to acknowledge, because in addition to thinking about making a functional landscape that is also beautiful, I thought, well, how does this get applied to the garden? Because it is kind of a shift in thinking patterns. And I do want to give voice to just a couple of the challenges I thought about, or some of the questions I had maybe.

Maybe challenge isn't the right language, but my first thought was, like, this a meeting of two different priorities. This kind of is and sometimes maybe three. As I was thinking about it, was like, well, traditionally, we have our food growers. So it's an orchard or it's a vegetable garden, and we're focused on just how much we can produce. And a lot of our garden plants have been selected for just production, as much as we can get out of them as possible, which means they're not going to be maybe the most robust plant and be able to survive as a perennial, even if they were a perennial.

So there's that kind of like silo of thinking. And then there's the silo of this needs to be beautiful, and I'm planting for pollinators, or I'm planting for blooms that I want to cut and harvest, or I'm planting for a certain formal aesthetic. And so then there's that silo, where it's like, I'm just purely making my decisions based off of the aesthetic criteria. Then there's also and we'll get into this, too, as we talk about our plant selections there's the native group, right? And it's a purist, kind of a native way of thinking, or native plant selections, where it's like, I'm going to forego some of the aesthetic qualities because it's beneficial to pollinators or because I'm trying to achieve a certain ecological function.

And it's fine to maintain those three silos. This kind of pulls it together, which can be a little overwhelming to me. Like, that I just want to give voice to. I'm like, This feels a little bit like I'm going to need to do some brain work with this to get through this. And a lot of the plants that I was reading about, like adding to a landscape or incorporating as an edimental in my landscape, I don't currently eat.

So there's a plant, like a taste palette that might need to be updated and some experimentation, and, you know, the family might resist strongly with some different things. And so we can evolve our plant or our taste palate over time with exposure, but it might not be super comfortable out of the gate. So there's that to contend with as well. Thoughts?

Yep. There's there's all of that subjectiveness of flavor and texture. Yeah. That it's hard to select for all of those things. Beautiful.

Tastes great. Feels good when you're like eating it. It's not like too slimy for maybe your our palates. And then you would get a bountiful harvest that's make maybe worth having it there. Yeah.

Like and more. You know? And also having the right criteria of site conditions and and all of that. I mean, yeah. We're just adding more stuff to your gardening plate here, so to speak.

I I think some of the native stuff, it's kind of a destructive harvest. So if you're eating it, you're not going to have more of it. So you're going have to have plenty of it. So if you do want to try to eat it, it's the roots and stuff like that.

Well, I I want I just wanted to give that overview. I do want to get into some of the plants because this is really fun to, like, explore some of the plants that we have in our landscape. Before we do that, just one final comment, which is if anybody wants to get into this, I want to try to incorporate it more in my landscape. And my plan is to start small, to just kind of dip my toes into this. I'm not tearing on any landscapes.

Just going to slowly learn and build this knowledge. And I encourage anybody else to do the same. Just you know, we have seasons ahead of us. We can we can keep adding to our plant palettes. But should we talk about some of the plants that we either knew we had in our landscape that are edible or that we didn't know were edible but discovered that they were.

Let's dig in. Ken, got any plants that are delicious and look look good scrumptiously?

Yes. I I I think I took more of the native route just looking at it. So I found a book called edible wild plants of the prairie, an ethnobotanical guide, by Kelly Kenshere. It's by university or University Press of Kansas. So I didn't find this too late in the game, so I haven't gone through the whole thing yet.

But I just kind of looked at, kind of listened, and a few things either I have in my landscape or that I've heard of as far as native plants go. And these are like the herbaceous perennials, not necessarily woody plants. One was lead plant, which is I think one of my favorite native plants, so people aren't familiar with that. It's kind of got a, they're kind of grayish leaves are really it's pretty sure it's a compound leaf, kind of small, kind of like a a mimosa tree, kind of a smaller compound. It's kind of feathery, kind of delicate looking, it's got these purple flowers with anthers or the stigmas that are orange.

They're right now they're they're blooming in my yard on was it June 16? So they're I think that's kind of why they it caught my mind because it's it's blooming right now. But the leaves of these flowers can be harvested and dried and use them to make a tea, which is how do they describe it? Yellow and pleasant to taste for the tea. So I'm not a tea person, but I may have to go pick some tonight and and dry them out in my never ending quest to find a tea that I like.

So so that's one that I was not. I never really expected to be a native plant that you can eat. It also mentions here that it's a useful indicator of a diverse native prairie where other edible plants can be found. So according to this particular book. Another one that I came across in there that I've got in my landscape that's also blooming now is purple poppy mellow.

So for that one, you can harvest this is one that you would harvest the roots. So depending on how much you have, you probably don't wanna do that. I've I've I've only got a couple plants, so I'm not gonna be digging the roots. They're supposed to be a sweet starchy root, tastes somewhat like a sweet potato. But I don't like sweet potatoes, so maybe I won't like it.

That's a that's another discussion we need to have later.

Yeah. The sweet potato, anti sweet potato? Oh my goodness. I'm pretty sure Ken wrote an article all about sweet potatoes and yams. Yeah.

I think so.

That's it. Yeah.

We should link it right here. Right here. Mhmm.

So yes. Yes. I don't like sweet potato. At least sweet potatoes I've eaten, haven't liked. Maybe there's a sweet potato out there that I haven't tried.

Then the other thing for purple papamela is the leaves are also edible. And usually a lot of times they were, this is by native Americans, and they were cooked and they would be used to thicken soups, kind of like okra, they're kind of mucilaginous. So maybe I'll try that. I've got more leaves than roots. And then one more, there's a lot more in this book, but another one I picked out that I've got growing anyway, is common milkweed.

That's when you talk about it having those cardiac glycosides and probably not something, you want to eat. But apparently, according to this book anyway, the young shoots and the small leaves in the spring if you cook them, kind of like asparagus shoots, they are edible. The flowers, the buds and immature fruit and late spring or summer, are also cooked and eaten. For all of these, you know, they are, they have some toxins in them, so they need to be cooked, boiled, change the water, before you eat them. So when they say cook for four minutes with at least one change of water.

So you could could potentially eat that, but I'd do your homework before you do that. So but that was that was not one I was expecting, to be on that list of of edible or things that were eaten, by Native Americans, either.

Sounds like sounds like pokeweed preparation almost. Get the young pokeweed sprouts. You have to boil them multiple times.

Mhmm.

Yeah. Mhmm. Mhmm. Not native, but it also reminds me of that would be the hosta, which is very, you know, familiar to everybody. Like, doing the same thing, you know, harvesting those those early shoots.

And so

Are you supposed to boil those? Because I just just ate those. So. I don't think you have boil. Plant.

That explains a few things, though. Was good. Tastes like a butter head lettuce. Yeah.

Okay. I was thinking you're being serious. You've tried them. I've not

Oh, yeah. Mhmm. Okay. But the mature leaves do not taste good, don't think.

So and the fiddleheads are some ferns too. Mhmm. I mean, I don't know if it's specific. I have seen ostrich fern. I don't know if all ferns fit into that.

That would be another to your homework before going out and eating it. And just one more for the that I had on my list for the herbaceous native perennials was Jerusalem artichoke, sometimes called tuberous sunflower. That's one where the the roots, I guess the tubers that they they produce are also edible. They are high in lignin. So I guess this is good for, you know, they've got those carbohydrates that aren't broken out easily, by the body, so for diabetic people and stuff like that.

But, it can lead to excessive gas formation in your digestive tract. So sometime referred to as fart choke. Nice. That's if you eat them right, you cook them, that helps with that. This book has got a lot of a lot of descriptions, from, you know, from the eighteen hundreds and from Native Americans.

Of them refer to, the the gaseous nature of these if you eat them raw and stuff. So it's not just a modern thing.

Right. Well, watch out bean burgers, you now have a contender, at least in my digestive tract.

Yes. So it was one quote. Alexander Henry, who was an explorer said, when boiled, the root is tolerably good eating, but when eaten raw, is of a windy nature and sometimes causes severe colic.

Children are of windy natures.

Yes. That is, oh, that's a brilliant way of describing.

Much better with language than I am.

Yes.

But that is one I've I have heard of people growing and eating. But again, you're digging the plants. But these I think can be a little on the aggressive side, so that may not necessarily be a bad thing that you're occasionally digging them and eating them. And I think there are some that are maybe over time have been cultivated to have bigger tubers compared to the kind of the straight native species. And I think a straight native species, I think from what I've come across, has a little bit of flavor, but they're much smaller tubers and stuff.

So potentially one one to try it as well. And then the last one I had, I was just flipping through a book, called Landscaping with Fruit, from Lee Reich. And there's all kinds of stuff. One popped out to me and that was Hackberry because that's pretty common tree. It grows all over the place.

This weekend I was doing some weeding and I don't know how many hackberry trees I pulled out of my garden beds because they are everywhere. And I've seen the fruit, at least immature fruit. Don't know if I've ever actually seen a mature fruit on a hackberry tree because the birds eat them all. So, while it is edible, you you may have you may have to get that earlier, net your plants or something to actually get the fruit. But when that fruit turns purple, it's supposed to be a rather sweet, pleasant fruit, is usually the description I find, but it does have a hard seed on the inside.

So don't start chomping on them. You may chip a tooth or something like that. So but that is one that you can eat. You're gonna have to get a whole lot of fruit to make much of an impact on your hunger, but if you can beat the birds, it's edible.

I adore that. Like, because I love hackberry, and I didn't I did not realize that about their the fruit. I'm I don't know if you have to net it, keep the birds away, but, like, seems like it'd be worth it. It's gosh. One more reason to plant all the hackberries and stop pulling them out of the ground, Ken.

Well, yeah, I didn't know this before this weekend, so I'm gonna have to leave Alex. If I have one in a good spot, I may leave it, and then fifteen, twenty years, I can report back on.

Sounds great. Well, that was awesome. Thank you for for sharing all of those. I I think those are all really cool plants to include in the landscape. And I actually have most of them in my landscape, so that's really, really good.

Chris, you wanna keep the fun going and share about your edible landscape?

Sure. Yeah. I we do have several things. Now this is probably going to be maybe more of a run of the mill edible landscaping things. If you've read an article about it, I bet I got them here on my list.

But but first off is blueberry. I have a high bush. I have four high bush blueberries in my yard. And, you know, we went through the whole logistics of digging up soil, amending it, and they're very happy where I have them. Right now, actually, we just harvested a very small colander of blueberries over lunchtime today.

Small because we think the flower buds got hit kind of hard by one of our late season frosts, which wasn't really a frost, actually more of a deep freeze that we had in our area. So also probably need to do some pruning on them to to help with some of that, get some of that old wood out of there, get some new shoots going. But but blueberry is probably going to be my favorite edible ornamental because it has the white spring flowers, the little bell shaped, very very dainty looking flowers. I really I love the flowers. And then followed by, of course, the delicious blueberries.

And then once we get towards the end of the season, we get some delightful red fall color. And as we get into winter, the leaves drop and the stems are red of these two. So I I mean, you got four seasons of interest. You got an edible crop coming off of them. And at least when we have them, when they're more prolific, I mean, we're putting them on everything from like smoothies, shakes, cereal, yogurt.

You know, we're we're adding this to a lot. We even have some strawberries growing nearby too. So when those are all in season at the same time, every once in a while, we get some lates later harvest strawberries. They're having a good time in the garden. So And I will say the blueberry is the one I can get my kids to still come up out and harvest and still participate in the garden with me.

Everything else is like, we don't want to do that. We don't want to do that. But they do want to pick blueberries because they they are delicious. And they're like, can we eat some of these while we pick them? Like, of course.

So that's probably also why the colander wasn't very full over lunchtime today. In addition to that, I did plant a hazelnut shrub. We've had hazelnut in our yard for a couple years. Now I have never gotten a harvest off of this particular shrub. Now I've gone to other places and harvested hazelnut off of theirs, but probably the reason is because I only have one hazelnut shrub, and you need multiples of these to get good pollination and then to get, you know, some type of a kernel development within that nut.

So I need more hazelnuts, kind of hoping there's some wild growing somewhere, but so far hasn't happened yet. Now, if we peel away a little bit from some of the more native ones, so the highbush blueberry, native to North America. Hazelnut, this one is particularly native to where I'm located here in Western Illinois. I actually harvested this from a wild hazelnut shrub from and put it in my own yard. My next ones though, these are not necessarily native but I do like the way they look and the first is rhubarb.

I just love rhubarb. It looks like a like a prehistoric plant with the massive leaves. I even kind of like the flower stalks that come up, although I still cut them off after a day or two of enjoying them just because, you know, I want a bigger plant, more stems, more rhubarb. Well, not stems, right? They're petioles, technically.

But so rhubarb is another ornamental but edible staple in my landscape that is perennial. And then for years, I have enjoyed other people's asparagus. Like, not the flavor, not eating it, but just looking at it. I love the texture of asparagus. I love the fine kind of textured qualities of the ferns.

And then the yellow fall color of asparagus, I think, is so cool. And so this year, I planted asparagus not in a garden patch, not in a specific bed made for asparagus, but in the middle of my pollinator plot. So we'll see how that goes. But I also have a lot of other aggressive native species in there, like goldenrod. So, you know, they can go duke it out with each other.

Now, Emily, you had talked about having kind of like these pops of seasonal or maybe annuals out there. So we do a lot of containerized vegetables, which I would consider ornamental, so Swiss chard. And normally we'll use bright lights. We'll seed those every spring and I'll plant them out. We've been doing some, like, red beets that have red foliage, which I think are really striking.

Combine that with Russian kale. Sometimes we just do pots of just parsley, you know, rosemary, sage, thyme, all the good ones. Can't forget ornamental sweet potato vine, which Ken, I can't believe you don't like sweet potatoes. We're going to have to talk off air about this. And then finally, one thing that I will just throw in there is I had a really it was an interesting but good salad this spring.

And if anybody remembers, we did a video about spring beauties. Well, I got to harvest some spring beauty leaves along with some common blue violet flowers and mix those all together, put a little bit of little olive oil, vinegar, salt, pepper. That was pretty good salad this spring. So that you know, we we can harvest that out of my yard now too.

Well, look at you. You're doing it. You didn't even know you're in an edimental landscape. Either one of you.

Who knew?

Well, I think that, like, I'm glad we're doing this because I do think that people are growing more of these than we realize. Right? That when we start being conscious of some of the the edibility is that a word? Of these plants, kind of opens our eyes. Oh, I will just say, too, the blueberry is new to me, and you guys had a conversation about figs with our now retired educator Elizabeth Wally, and I have a fig growing in my in a container.

I don't know if I like figs. So, like, I'm not gonna go into that anymore, but that was a that was I put that into a container, and it's very the leaves are beautiful. I we'll see we'll see what comes of it. But the blueberry and the fig are not on my list, but I wanted they get honorable mentions because I thought it's kind of additions. So my list.

All right. So probably to no one's surprise, I'm going start off with some trees. So first, amylancher, the serviceberry. We've mentioned it before. I think people are aware of the four season beauty that it provides in a landscape.

It's got really lovely spring blooms and the white flowers. Fruit develops now. Mine is getting eaten by all the birds. It would have nice fruit on it, but it it is a magnet for birds. I saw a cedar waxwing on it the other day, which was really exciting.

I don't see a lot of those where I'm at now. And so I was really, really excited to see that little one enjoying the the fruits of the serviceberry. Just nice clean foliage throughout the year. Not a lot bothers it. It turns bright red, brilliant red in the fall.

And then I like the kinda, like, the grayish smooth bark. I think it's got a really nice, like, ornamental quality throughout the winter. So that's the four season beauty aspect of it. But if you can get to the fruits before all the wildlife does, It's like a powerhouse of nutrition. And so I was doing some reading about how especially important it was to indigenous peoples.

And so it's a widespread tree, And there were even tribes that would move, like, camp locations to where service berries were growing to harvest them. It was such a vital nutrition source for them. And I liked I just wanna kinda talk about how they used it because I'm hopeful to harvest some, and I'm trying to figure out how I wanna use the fruit. There's a berries. You can use them fresh or dried, and I think I'll try to dry them and use them, you know, kind of in place of some of our, other dried berries like raisins and whatnot.

But so they would use them to make something that was called, and I hope I'm pronouncing this right, pemmican? Pemican maybe?

I was sure. Pemecan.

Pemecan? Okay. I don't

know if that's right or not.

Okay. Sincere apologies to anybody who knows the correct pronunciation. Anyways, the idea is that it is a mixture, and I want to make sure I get this right, of animal fat, dried meat, and these crushed berries. And all I can think about is the protein ball fad that is currently just raging online, and I thought this is that's like a it's a protein ball. There's your fats in there, there's your carbohydrates, and there's your your proteins.

Like, just brilliant. So I might also I probably won't use dried meat as a part of my protein ball, but I probably will use the service berries. So anyways, just really I love the tree anyways. And so that's in my landscape. Wish I had more.

Next is elderberry. So it's Sambucus nigra canadensis. And so this is black elderberry. I have this growing wild in my windbreak. I was once asked where to get it, and I was like, come on over.

Because it just it recedes itself in windbreak. And so a gorgeous plant. I've always really loved it, but it is big. And so I do leave it kind of in on the edge of my landscape. I don't put it in my garden beds.

But it could be used as a hedge, you know, in a landscape. And so the flowers are edible. They have these really beautiful white, really large umbral blooms that are blooming right now in my landscape. And so I've heard of, like, frying them up. I think you can eat them raw, but everybody likes to fry things, and so that's the way I've been recommended to eat them.

But I think I'll go out and grab one and try just try a bite of it. And so those are flowers, and they'll develop into a berry that can be used as fresh or dried. But I wanna make I wanna get like the syrup out of it because I've had elderberry syrup. Oh my goodness. Like, it's one of my favorite things.

Like, it's so the way it was mixed up was it was like a warm kind of like, I don't know. Just it was a treat. So I'm gonna go ahead and try to get to my elderberry and harvest those. You can also make pie or wine or jams, but I think I'm just gonna try to do the the syrup. Will link my nutrition and wellness colleague shared a recipe with me that she trusts, and so I'll share that link with everybody if you want to try to make your own.

But it's just a lovely, lovely plant. Now this one is actually in my this next one is in my landscape bed. I put it there on purpose. I actually planted more there than survived, and I'm bummed that I don't have more of them. But it's aronia, and so black chokeberry.

It's another one of those four season plants. It's so pretty. Really cool. One is the Melanocarpa is smaller. It's a smaller Aronia, so it's five foot.

It's like as tall as I am. You know, it's not overwhelmingly large. But it's really lovely in the winter months. The berries persist on it. They turn red in the later part of the year, but they'll they'll persist on the plant.

So you've got cool branch structure along with some red berries. In the spring, you've got fragrant white flowers, relatively clean green foliage throughout the year that turns red in the fall. So just like a really lovely ornamental plant. And the fruit, again, similar to the elderberry, can be harvested, kind of a powerhouse of nutrition. They call them superfoods.

I don't know if that's actually a thing, but that's how I've seen them advertised, just as having a lot of nutritional value to them. And so similar to elderberry, though, like, they're, you know, they're called chokeberry is their common name. And so really, like, an astringent taste, so they need to be cooked and processed. I think you can eat them ripe if you're brave, but I think you make a funny face doing it. And so, you know, to each their own.

I think I'll process mine, though. Okay. Those are the woody plants that I have in my landscape that I wanted to call attention to, that I that I am gonna try to harvest some food off of. These are ones I didn't know I could eat, and I do have in abundance, these next two. Spiderwort, transcanthia is one.

I have it all over. I love the it's just like it's a shorter it's got a long bloom season, but it's it's like in the early part of summer, and then it just kinda fades out. It's not, like, overly appealing, you know, like grass like foliage. It's not messy or anything. It just kind of, like, fades into the background of my landscape.

But right now, these, like, bright blue flowers are blooming, and they close-up at night and is that right? Yeah. Close-up at night and open during the day. They're just so, like, magical. You know, like, just really, really neat.

And you can eat them. I did not know that. So I'll have to just go grab a cup and throw it in the salad at dinnertime and see what everybody says. But so I like spider wart. George Washington Carver, I did find a note about this.

And so he did a lot of breeding with peanuts and sweet potatoes. Again, Ken, we're gonna this may be all turned into a sweet potato episode. But both of them have a rich flavor to them. And so just kind of like native Spiderwort has a rich flavor, so I'm gonna give that a shot. What else?

Oh, and this is my final one. And I got a lot of this in my landscape. And now everybody is lambsquarter. I have a love hate with lambsquarter, I guess, because it's edible. But I got so much of it, so maybe it's not a weed.

Maybe I can just start harvesting it. Now I was I was doing research, saw that, and I thought, no, nope, I don't want to do that. Like, these are supposed to be plants we're planting in our landscape for their ornamental value. Now, that is in the eye of the beholder, right? I'm probably not gonna plant it.

I'm not gonna leave I'm not gonna plant it, but I have it. And so I just wanted to bring it up because we have it. Apparently, the greens are extremely nutritious and can be incorporated into a salad. And so, like, Chris, when you're making your spring salad, you know, maybe you've got some lemons, quarter emerging, grab some of that. It's supposed to and this is what caught my attention and why it's actually on this list here, was that I was reading that it contains three times as much calcium as cooked spinach, and it has more vitamin A and C than spinach, and that they are exceptionally high in protein and fiber.

So, like, that's a pretty powerful leafy vegetable. You know, like, if we're going be harvesting things, like, we always say, like, oh, eat your spinach, right? But this lamb's quarter, you know, might be worth a try. There is, and it's been used by indigenous people for eons to the point where we think it's not native, but it is so prevalent in the records of indigenous cultures that we're not quite sure if it's native or not. And so honorable mention to lamb's quarter.

I spent a lot of my childhood pulling this weed, and now I might be eating it.

Now I might be eating my spider wart. I got plenty of that too. So, yeah, I'm gonna give it a try.

Like a spider wart and Liam's Quarter salad. Mhmm. Got that. Anything else you guys want? Like, do we find any, like, honorable mentions, or do we kind of hit all of the ones that we wanted to?

Well, so, Emily, you talk about you have blueberries up and coming, a fig. I mean, mine my next one that I'm going planning on incorporating because it both has ornamental appeal and edible appeal is gonna be sand cherry. Like, that is the next one on the docket. Ken, do you got anything? Maybe maybe it's not in the ground or maybe it's in the ground this year that you haven't tried yet?

We I we planted a fig after episode of Elizabeth. It's called Fig Newton. The kids named it. So we've we planted a grape plant. We had Elizabeth on a couple of years ago.

Finally got around to planting grapes. So trying to there's probably stuff. We'll just have to see what what I find for sale and what ends up in the yard. But, yeah, I and we've got blueberry. Well, we had blueberries in pots.

Year two, I didn't get them taken into the garage, I think they they froze out. So we'll probably get some more blueberries at some point.

For me, adding plants to the landscape isn't the issue. It's like the like plating them. Right? Like just being more adventuresome as a as a consumer. So I think that's going to be my focus is, you know, like the spider wart.

Like, I had no idea. Have echinacea growing in the landscape, and I've never made a tea. I'm not a big tea drinker, but, you know, it's it's there. Like, why not try it? Just kind of broaden your my know, your palate.

You can try it. If I don't like it, then that's that, but why not? So

There's prickly pear cactus. It's native to Illinois. Oh, yeah. Do like prickly pear. I've thought about putting some next to our driveway because it's really gravelly.

We've got a gravel driveway, but I haven't pulled the trigger on it because I'm afraid it may spread into the neighbor's yard.

Yeah.

I don't wanna get yelled at.

I have had prickly pear. It's it's good. I really like the leaves, and you can eat the flowers. So the leaves. You gotta take the you gotta take the thorns off.

They're not thorns, but I don't have anywhere for it. I think it's gonna be too wet in our soils. I'd have to modify it. How about you, Chris?

Yeah. I don't think I'd have a good spot for it. I need to get a whiskey barrel and just fill it with sand, and and then I'll have a spot.

Easy peasy. Mhmm.

Passionate flower. That's another one. That will eat your yard. So be careful with that one, but it's a cool plant.

You know, I didn't even do any research on this, but I wonder if there's any of our native grass seed heads that you can pick and maybe cook like a wild rice or a grain.

The book I mentioned does have a section of wild the wild grasses of the prairie. So this is more like Great Plains. Some of the stuff I don't know if you necessarily have. Eastern Gamma Grass.

Oh, I like me some wild rice. So Mhmm.

I think lamb's quarter also. I think lamb's quarter, you can harvest the seed and use it like a quinoa kind of a thing I've seen it described as. I try not to let it get to that point. But Mhmm.

And, you know, I know a lot of other folks are planting amaranths

Yeah.

And harvesting the the seeds from that as a grain. Oh, there's whole other world out there where I think we've just, as always, scratched the surface.

Yeah. For the the eastern gamma grass, that's they've it's been trialed by the Land Institute in Selena, Kansas as a native prairie plant to potentially develop as a perennial green crop. So they do have a we can put a link to the book or the title of that book in the notes if people are interested. But they've got several grass species in there that look like we're we're eating.

I found a website, and I'll just mention here, it's called Plants for a Future. It's it it has a a really extensive database on, like, the edibility of different plants. And so I'm gonna link that too. Let me see if I can find any grasses.

Well, that was a lot of great information about the the plants in our yards that we find both beautiful and delicious with a Good Growing podcast production of University of Illinois Extension, edited this week by me, Chris Enroth. Hey, Emily. Thanks so much for hanging out and suggesting a great topic for this week of the Edimentals.

My pleasure, Chris. And Ken, thanks for having me again. I learned a lot, so I really appreciate the opportunity to kind of explore a new topic, maybe not totally outside of our comfort zone. Right? Like, it just kind of brought in how I'm thinking about things.

So I hope that viewers and listeners are now walking around their landscape scratching their heads like I am. Like, can I eat that? Is that edible?

And Ken, thank you so much as always for being here. And good luck on that lead plant tea. Let me know if it's any better than that holly tea that you sent me.

Yeah. So I will do that. Thank you, Emily and Chris. And if people are going go out eating stuff in the yard, again, make sure you idea correctly and do your homework. You don't want to get yourself get yourself sick.

So but there's our disclaimer for today.

Yes.

And let's do this again next week.

Oh, we shall do this again next week. Does somebody have a big birthday coming up? Well, think they do. The fourth of July is fast approaching. And so we are gonna talk a little bit about the gardens of the founding fathers.

And because there was some pretty interesting early horticultural science going on at that point in time. So we're gonna dive into that next week. Well, listeners, thank you for doing what you do best, and that is listening, or if you watched us on YouTube watching. And as always, keep on growing.

University of Illinois Extension. Well, this is getting old.

Well, we we know exactly where you cut off because it shocked both Emily and I. It it is the you don't like sweet potatoes. Yes.