Strategies About How to Create a Beautiful Vegetable Landscape

Plant Colorful Varieties

• Many edible greens have a uniform green color, but choose more colorful varieties to beautify an edible landscape. Annual radicchio (Cicchorium intybus) has striking magenta foliage with white veins, for example. "Trout Back" lettuce (Lactuca sativa "Trout Back"), another annual, has green leaves speckled with a wine-red color that adds a lot of visual interest to the landscaped compared to the standard green varieties. "Dark Opal" basil (Ocimum basilicum) is a tasty purple-leafed annual herb for the designer's palette.

Select Distinctive Cultivars

• Beyond the standard vegetable varieties, seed catalogs offer an immense selection of more intriguing varieties. For example, "Romanesco" broccoli (Brassica olearcea "Romanesco") has florets in an unusual spiraling fractal pattern and a lime-green color that makes regular annual broccoli seem quite homely. Annual "Moon and Stars" watermelon (Citrillus lanatus "Moon and Stars") has dark, purplish-green flesh covered with small yellow flecks and the occasional orange orb that are the inspiration for its wondrous name.

Strategic Placement

• While many vegetables have breathtaking beauty from the seedling stage to harvest, others go through some awkward growth stages. For example, tomatoes (Solanum lycopersicum) have little visual interest except for their ripe fruits and often suffer from fungal diseases that makes the lower foliage unsightly midway through the growing season. They are best as a green backdrop with tidy looking, medium-sized vegetables in the foreground, such as bell peppers (Capsicum annuum) and eggplant (Solanum melongena), all of which should be treated as annuals for the best yield. That way, the less attractive parts of the tomato plants are hidden and the gorgeous fruits are visible in the top half of the plants as they ripen.

Mix In Ornamentals

• Intersperse annual flowers with vegetables to give season-long color and anchor the aesthetic composition. The beauty of many vegetables is quite ephemeral, while annual flowers bloom repeatedly and also attract beneficial insects and pollinators that make vegetable gardens healthier and more productive. Plant cool-season annual flowers, like sweet pea (Lathyrus odoratus), with vegetables that like similar weather -- salad greens and most crunchy vegetables. When the soil warms in spring, couple summer flowers, like French marigold (Tagetes patula), with heat-loving vegetables -- anything in the tomato or squash (Curcurbita spp.) family.