Front Yard Edible Oasis

While working with the client during the landscape design process, we identified the following goals for their dream landscape: reduce the amount of lawn needing to be maintained, create an area for year-round organic gardening, create a path the get from the driveway to the front door, have an area to entertain guests and neighbors, increase ecological biodiversity, and incorporate fruit trees and berry bushes that could be harvested and shared with neighbors.

To achieve these goals we crafted a plan to remove two thirds of the existing lawn and replace it with a mixture of native perennial flowers, grasses, shrubs, and spring ephemerals, regionally adapted fruit trees and berry bushes, and culinary herbs, build three raised garden beds just a short distance from the front door for quick and easy harvesting, construct a slate chip pathway that would match the color of the house, create a fire pit area for entertaining, and incorporate as many fruits and berries as possible - including near the stop sign where neighborhood children walked to the school bus every morning.

In this design we incorporated two dwarf fig trees, one satsuma citrus tree, three pawpaw trees, one asian persimmon tree, one elderberry tree, five pineapple guava shrubs, eight blueberry bushes, and two blackberry trellises.