You can grow organic fruits and vegetables and still have an enjoyable, attractive garden year round with the help of The Beautiful Edible Garden (Ten Speed Press, 2013). Authors and landscape design team, Leslie Bennett and Stefani Bittner give you great container garden ideas that are beautiful as well as edible. In this excerpt from chapter five, “Beautiful Edible Containers, Window Boxes, Side Yards and Other Small Spaces,” learn which plants are best for container gardening as well as for your kitchen.

Your space is limited, so you’ll need to use it wisely and grow plants that are really transformative to your eating and cooking experience. You’ll also want to choose plants that are well suited to containers. This criteria can yield any number of combinations of plants for your garden — here are a few that no cook should be without:

• A full range of culinary herbs, including herbs for teas and cocktail infusions
• Salad and braising greens
• Citrus, especially lemon or lime
• Easy-to-grow, highly productive annual vegetables such as bush green beans, peppers, cherry tomatoes, chard, and kale
• Harvest-as-you-need-them annual vegetables such as scallions, shallots, and celery

To read more please follow this link to Mother Earth Living: http://www.motherearthliving.com/gardening/gardening-tips/container-garden-ideas-ze0z1305zpit.aspx#ixzz2VSpVyMM4

Here is our recent blog post for  Chalkboard Magazine on one  of The Beautiful Edible Garden‘s DIY Garden arrangements!  The Useful Garden Herb Wreath is one of our favorite Studio Choo moments from the book — so easy and the perfect DIY project for any occasion!

WE LOVE THIS DIY from within the pages of The Beautiful Edible Garden. ..  Here are the authors and gardeners behind the project…

FRESH HERBS change the way we eat. The best way to start growing food is to simply integrate these beautiful and productive plants into your overall landscape or in a dedicated herb garden. Not only will they reward you with their beautiful and edible foliage and flowers, they are the basis of a Beautiful Edible Garden! Once they get started you will have plenty to add to your daily meals, share with friends or create garden- based projects. One of our favorite ways to use our garden herbs is to create an herb wreath. Beautiful to hang in your kitchen and within arm’s reach of your next meal!

START IN THE GARDEN

Head out to the garden and snip away! You’ll need to cut large branches of rosemary.  Mint, lemon verbena, sage, chives, thyme or any of your other favorite herbs all make great additions!

GATHER YOUR MATERIALS

You’ll need a spool of twine, scissors and all of your gathered your herbs. Place all the herbs but the rosemary aside and lay the rosemary out on a large enough working space for the wreath you’d like to make.

LAY OUT THE ROSEMARY

Start building the wreath by laying out long sections of rosemary to build the frame for the wreath. Form them into a circle shape.

BUILD YOUR FRAME

Begin to bind the sections of rosemary together using bakers twine or your favorite natural gardening twine. Work your way around the circle til all the branches are firmly bound.

ADD YOUR HERBS

Using the same twine you used to to build the frame, simply make little bunches of each herb in your hand and tie them to the rosemary frame. Work your way around and attach as many bunches to you like throughout the wreath.

Once you’re finished, hang your completed wreath up to dry. Use the wreath for your own culinary preparations or use as a perfect gift for your friends and family.

A special thanks to Jill and Alethea from Studio Choo for sharing their techniques for utilizing edible and ornamental plants from the garden in home arrangements in The Beautiful Edible Garden.  Make sure to check out their amazing new book, The Flower Recipe Book!

Reprinted with permission from The Beautiful Edible Garden: Design a Stylish Outdoor Space Using Vegetables, Fruits, and Herbs by Leslie Bennett and Stefani Bittner, copyright © 2013. Published byTen Speed Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group. Photos by Jill Rizzo.

Large standard lemon trees and english lavender add both an edible and formal touch to this classic boxwood lined garden!

English lavender and Boxwood hedge.

Arbors, trellises and large cottage baskets are used throughout the annual vegetable garden for structure.

Dwarf citrus, salad greens and potatoes are grown in grow bags inside these lovely cottage baskets.  The baskets are surrounded by perennial herbs, edible flowers and annual vegetables!

The front yard edible garden is based around raised beds made of Corten steel, a “living fence” of espaliered citrus and stone fruit trees, with lots of our favorite perennial plantings surrounding, including evergreen blueberry hedging, pineapple guava and edible passionfruit!

Well, to start with, there’s Teddy, Robert, and Rhonda. Teddy’s wonderful wife, Lynn, was raised at her family’s dairy farm – the Robert Giacomini Dairy Farm in Point Reyes and is now at the helm of another family business, Point Reyes Family Farmstead Cheeses, working to create the most delicious artisanal cheeses (Point Reyes Blue anyone?!). Once he joined Lynn at the farm, Teddy had the brilliant idea to start another business — putting the natural byproduct of all the cow manure produced on the property to sustainable use as bulk and bagged organic compost! He, Robert and Rhonda, are the ones who make this great quality compost available to us all.

A few weeks ago, Teddy, Robert and Rhonda invited us out for a Day at the Farm to show us how they make their compost and explain what the process is all about.

Unsurprisingly, making great cheese and fabulous compost has everything to do with what you feed your cows. The cows at Point Reyes Compost Co. are pastured on organic certified land near Tomales Bay for much of the year and also have their diet supplemented with a bunch of really healthy sounding organic things like brewer’s grains (sustainable leftovers from Lagunitas Brewing Co!), crushed almond hulls (for roughage) and some cottonseed meal and corn.

The cows eat — then, what the folks at Point Reyes (never ones to mince words) call the “shit river” is carried away and allowed to dry out. Amazingly, the methane from this process is all captured and used on site – about 80% of operations at the dairy are run off this methane! Totally impressive and, really, a sustainable, smart business approach.

While the manure is given the time it needs to turn into compost, all kinds of other wonderful things are happening at the farm: cows are being milked (700 cows are milked each day, starting at 3pm and going until 3am!), adorable baby cows are being born and raised, and award-winning cheeses are being made!

Our tour of the farm ended with the most delicious cheese-tasting and lunch at the farm’s beautiful new onsite culinary and educational center, The Fork.

We got a special tour of the edible garden afterward too – those vegetables have some awe-inspiring views!

As Teddy, Rhonda and Robert always say: “Thanks for taking our crap!” This time, we have to say — thank you guys!