Our expert growers at Fleet Farming and our Edible Landscapes service have designed companion planting designs to make it easier than ever to grow food in Florida! Check out the templates below for our recommendations for Spring, Summer, and Fall growing periods.
Seeking a design for your upcoming Edible Landscapes garden? Below is how our Edible Landscape service works:
See our Edible Landscapes Installation Agreement to view the terms and conditions of our Edible Landscapes garden installation service. Agreements are also provided in your garden invoice.
It’s a Lamiaceae family reunion! Rosemary, Cuban oregano, and Thyme intermixed with seasonal herbs and onions. All herbs will be planted based on the availability in our greenhouse.
Sugary-sweet snap peas are a favorite in the Spring! They can be delicately planted with companion crops like beets, turnips, and more!
Rainbow Chard intercropped with stunning borage flowers that taste like cucumber! Nasturtium makes the bees happy while the smooth red oak and watermelon radishes help elevate any dish this season!
Spring is the perfect time to grow tender, leafy greens like Black Seeded Simpson, Red Oak Lettuce, Swiss Chard, and Arugula. Add in some edible Marigolds and you will have a perfect salad fresh every day!
Three varieties of mild or sweet peppers nestled between beans, rosemary, green onions, parsley/cilantro, dill, or oregano. Everything you need to make your own pepper sauce this season!
Eggplants surrounded by nitrogen-fixing legumes, edible pollinator-attracting flowers, and Cuban Oregano will bring color into your yard. Aromatic herbs/ flowers repel harmful pests.
Sunflowers help regenerate soil, while okra and bush beans provide hardy summer staples. A blend of edible-flowers to help promote pollinators will help your crops produce until the end of Summer.
A standard and reliable mix going back ages to the earliest Mesoamerican native farming fundamentals. The three sisters are notable companion plants – beans, corn, and squash/pumpkins. Corn provides a structure for the beans to climb, the beans provide the nitrogen to the soil that the other plants use, and the squash spreads along the ground, blocking the sunlight, helping prevent the establishment of weeds. (learn more via Wikipedia)
When the season cools, so do our green selections! Hardy Kale and heads of Choi mixed with delicate Black Seeded Simpson and Red Oak help to bring tons of nutrients into your diet!
Seasonal root vegetables like carrots, a variety of turnips, and radishes complement each other when grown between green onions and pest-deterring marigolds.
Cherry tomatoes are candy from your yard and the taste is amplified when grown near fragrant herbs like Cuban Oregano, African Blue Basil, and pollinator-friendly Nasturtium!
The olla watering system is really really old. In fact, humans have been burying clay pots as a system of irrigation for as much as 10,000 years based on archeological findings.
If done right, it can be one of the simplest and most effective irrigation methods available. However, we have found it only works best with more mature plants, not seeds. Our drip irrigation combined with hand-watering is going to be the more effective method for getting your seeds to germinate. Once the plant has grown, the ollas will work really well.
1. Bury an olla up to its neck in the soil
2. Fill it up with water
3. Plant roots will grow towards the areas of soil that are moistened as water seeps through the porous material of the clay.
It all starts with the soil! Most of what happens in the garden happens underground out of sight and all to often, out of mind. The soil blend you use must be rich with nutrients and vitamins essential for your crops to have the immune system they will need to grow strong and healthy. Also, the better quality soil, the better pest resilience your crops will have.
Our soil blend is designed to foster the fungal, biotic, microbial, and insect life that makes the magic happen.
Layers:
Something that might not be intuitive to new gardeners is that you should never pull out weeds or an old plant by the roots. Why you ask? Because of all that work we put into building good soil!
When most of the critters and fungi that live in healthy soil are exposed to sunlight through activities like tilling or pulling weeds, they are killed by the UV light. While this might not seem like a problem, it takes time for soil life communities to heal, so each time the soil is disturbed that timer is reset.
Won’t the roots that I’m leaving in the ground cause problems for my new plants?
As a matter of fact, as the old roots start to dissolve and return their nutrients to the soil, they’ll leave passageways that absorb water more efficiently and keep soil texture fluffy and loose.
What about weeds or root vegetables?
Ok, so there are some exceptions. Sometimes you have to dig something out or pull something out, but the best practice is just to disturb the soil as little as possible.
What else should I know about soil health?
Boy oh boy – what isn’t there to know!? The good news is, we’ve done most of the homework for you. Your raised bed will only require a “refill” of compost and pine straw each season in order to keep the top layer mulched, moist, and fertile. We provide this service too, with rates based on the square footage of your garden.
If you want to know even more about this gardening philosophy, you can read about it here.
When it comes to deciding what to plant, it’s easy to skip straight to the table. In other words, it makes sense to grow what you like to eat, right?
Well, of course it does, but getting a healthy harvest is all about creating useful plant communities that share resources effectively instead of competing against one another.
Our pre-configured templates make sure that your harvest is supported by plants of different root depths, that require different nutrients and repel or attract insects according to the needs of the other plants around.
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