Like all real estate, location, location, location is the key to ideal food growing space. If you have a generous plot of land right outside your kitchen door with six hours of sun and crumbly humus soil, you have the perfect space for growing your own fruit and vegetables, and you probably don’t live in New Mexico. Ideally, you want your kitchen garden to be convenient to the food preparation and serving spaces of the house and patio, buffered from the hottest afternoon sun, safe from rabbits, deer, pocket gophers, and other kleptomaniacs of comestibles.

In most of our lives, there is the ideal and then there is what actually happens. The best place to grow edible plants in your garden may be the courtyard that serves as an outdoor living room or a garden space in prominent view from inside the house year-round. In that case, appearance is as important as taste; it’s not a space for row crops and compost heaps. Not only should the plants themselves be attractive, and many edible plants are quite beautiful, but how they are arranged also makes a difference.

The process of good xeric garden design always involves combining plants that are compatible in their soil, light, and water preferences, but factor in the desire to graze the landscape and careful choice of plants becomes paramount to success. Soils in New Mexico are just fine as they are for growing xeric ornamental plants, but many food crops aren’t adapted to the lean soils of arid climates. Whether you are considering fruit trees, berry bushes, or vegetables, the plants most often have origins in more temperate or tropical regions and have been bred over generations to increase the size and output of their produce. They want to sink roots into moist loamy soil, and our alkaline grit is as foreign to them as the lunar surface.

 

 

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