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By Jo Ellen Meyers Sharp  President Hoover Rose )Public Domain) Whether you call it an edible landscape, food scaping, stealth gardening, or veggies in pots, you have many choices for how to incorporate food into your landscape. Even better, unusual or uncommon edible plants add diversity to your garden and dinner table. Many ornamental plants are edible, however, when eating anything from the landscape, you want to make sure that the plants have not been treated with pesticides –– the last thing you want to put in your body. Several ornamental edible plants fall under the herb category; it’s just that we don’t always think of them as herbs. Here are five uncommon edible plants that will keep all but the foodies guessing. Lavender (Lavandula spp.)  French lavender Fragrance and a long bloom period are what make lavender a great plant for the garden and the menu. Grow this woody perennial in full sun where the soil drains well and may even be a little gravely. Lavender is drought-resistant, and butterflies, bees, and other pollinators love it. You’ll love it too when you add lavender flowers to ice cream (homemade even better), salads, scones, shortbreads, teas, ice cubes, and more. Dried buds are potent – so potent that they were used in mummification and health mixtures for all kinds of issues in the ancient past. Lavender comes from the Latin verb lavare, meaning “to wash.” One concern about using lavender in cooking is its intense flavor, which can make food have a soapy taste. Although all lavenders are edible, some are grown for their strong fragrance and oils for soaps, sachets, and lotions. The best edible lavender is English lavender (Lavandula angustifolia) because it has fewer oils. Nasturtium (Tropaeolum minus)  Nasturtium flowers (Kurt Stüber) GFDL The leaves and flowers of this annual add a peppery taste to salads. Rich in vitamin C and antioxidants, nasturtiums are easy to grow in a pot from seed. You might be able to find transplants of nasturtium in garden centers in the spring. Grow nasturtium in a sunny to partly sunny spot and water during dry spells. Apply a plant fertilizer according to label directions. Rose (Rosa spp.) Yes, you can eat your roses. The petals from this shrub can be tossed in salads especially, but also are used in baking shortbreads and scones. Rose hips (the seeds of roses) are common as a tea. Grow roses in full sun. Roses, especially the landscape types like Drift, Knock Out, and Flower Carpet, do best when fertilized and watered regularly. Use a fertilizer formulated for roses, such as Espoma Rose-tone, available at most garden centers and home improvement stores. Remember to apply fertilizer at the base of the plant rather than all over. You don’t want to eat plant fertilizer either, so be especially careful to keep it off the petals. Serviceberry (Amelanchier spp.)  Serviceberry blossoms (Dietmar Rabich) CC BY-SA 4.0 This is the perfect plant for four seasons. A native tree, it can be grown as a multi-stem or single-stem specimen. Serviceberry has slightly fragrant white flowers in spring, followed by purple, blue, or pink fruit in June, tremendous red-orange fall color, and attractive silvery bark that stands out in the winter landscape. In the wild, serviceberry is an understory tree, found in shafts of light or on the fringes of woodlands. The fruit is delicious, similar to blueberry. Use them in scones, mix with yogurt, or toss in a salad. If you don’t eat the fruit, the birds will. Wild violets (Viola spp.)  Wild violets (kitmasterbloke) CC BY 2.0 DEED What’s prettier than violet flowers mixed with butter and jellies spread on freshly baked biscuits? These perennial violets in the lawn or garden beds (some people call them weeds) are in the same family as edible pansies and Johnny jump-ups. Violets are easy to grow in sun or shade. Some gardeners transplant them from the lawn to flower beds where they work as a ground cover. If pulling from the lawn, be sure they have not been treated with herbicides, insecticides, or fungicides. If you’re worried about how to grow your edible garden without pesticides so you can safely eat the plants, remember that there are plenty of beneficial insects –– even spiders –– that help your garden grow. In addition to the pollinators, like bees, butterflies, flies, beetles, and birds, your plants need other critters in order to thrive. So, skip the pesticides that will kill all the bugs, and let nature work its magic.
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