Edible Rainbow Garden. Rosalind Creasy
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The color-coded seeds help gardeners know which color vegetable the plants will produce. Colorful herbs and vegetables can sparkle in a mixed border. ‘Red Rubin’ basil has been planted among lemon basil and species orange zinnias at the Kendall Jackson Winery display gardens in Santa Rosa, California.
Growing more than one color of snap beans makes the harvest more appealing. Pictured above are three varieties of bush beans in one bed: yellow ‘Roc d’Or,’ ‘Purple Queen,’ and green ‘Slenderette.’ All are available in one package from Renee’s Garden.
Rainbow flowers and vegetables make a Technicolor presentation. In the basket are ‘Burpee’s Golden’ beet, ‘Gypsy’ peppers, ‘Ruby Red’ chard, ‘Mandarin Cross’ tomato, ‘Gold Rush’ zucchini, and ‘Albina Verduna’ white beets.
Color Planning before Planting
The color range of your harvest will be a major planning consideration. You’ll need to pay particular attention to the number of plants to grow, and to selecting and coordinating particular varieties. For example, the special effect of some colorful vegetables depends on lots of different colored varieties being served together. Envision three colors, not one, of tomatoes or peppers arranged on a tray. To achieve that effect, you’ll want to grow two plants of three or four varieties where possible instead of three or four plants of one or two varieties. For a mix of color with root vegetables and lettuces, forgo planting one row of each color. Instead, mix the seeds of many colors of beets, carrots, or radishes and sprinkle them together in the planting bed. In most cases you’ll be able to tell the colors apart when you harvest because beets have distinct foliage and most shoulders of these vegetables show above the soil. (See the interview with Renee Shepherd for more information on mixing colorful vegetables in the same bed. Her seed company, Renee’s Garden, offers packages of mixed colors of vegetables and the seeds are color-coded so you can see which colors you are planting.)
designing a rainbow garden
Cheryl Chang helps to harvest the glorious bounty from the Hidden Villa rainbow garden.
When I first planted colorful vegetables, I primarily focused on their use in the kitchen. Finding many rainbow varieties more lovely in the garden than their monochromatic cousins, I soon started planning gardens that featured their bright colors. About the same time I became fascinated with colorful vegetables, I developed an interest in edible flowers. Again, their enticing colors drew me to them. Soon my passion for edible flowers and colorful vegetables dovetailed and I often grew them together. My favorite combinations became purple and pink violas and tulips with burgundy lettuces; orange and yellow nasturtiums and calendulas among the red and orange chards and beets; red onions and scallions with red dianthus; and ‘Lemon Gem’ marigolds interplanted with orange and yellow peppers.
With each garden I’ve grown, the rainbow effect gets stronger and the palette of plants expands. My first rainbow garden looked mostly green. Even though the radish roots were red and the corn kernels blue, their green foliage gave little hint of the unique vegetables. To enhance the impression of a rainbow garden, I’ve learned to include flowering plants in primary colors such as zinnias, salvias, violas, statice, calendulas, and marigolds. At first, I randomly interspersed the flowers. Now, for my favorite rainbow gardens, I arrange separate beds for the red, orange, yellow, green plants. Using poetic license, I combine the purple, indigo, and blue plants in the fifth bed.
Checking the Site
When planning a rainbow garden, I use the same techniques as when designing landscapes for my clients. My first step is to make sure the light exposure is correct. Most all edible plants need at least six hours of midday sun to survive; eight hours is better. I check for good rich soil and great drainage. (Appendix A includes information on soil preparation.) Then I compile a list of the vegetables to grow, noting each plant’s height and spread, and which varieties grow best in my climate.
Drawing to Scale
My next step is to draw the garden area to scale, one-quarter inch equaling one foot. Graph paper or an architect’s vellum with a grid for one-quarter-inch scale drawings is helpful. The vellum is available from drafting supply stores and can be purchased by the sheet. With my scale drawing and vegetable list ready, I design the garden.
I start by noting the garden’s southernmost point on the scale drawing. This is important because I want the tallest plants situated on the garden’s south side so they don’t shade the shorter plants. I also plan paths or locate stepping stones for easy access to weed and harvest.
Creating the Rainbow
Next I plan the beds according to the order of the colors in the rainbow—red, orange, yellow, green, and a combination of the blue and purple tones. It’s fun to select red vegetables for the red beds, orange varieties for the orange beds, and so on. I flesh out the unusual colors with the more common varieties by adding, say, orange carrots to the orange bed and red beets to the red bed. Using the height and spread data from my plant list, I arrange the red row from back to front, choosing the tallest plants for the back, south side. For example, the twelve-foot-tall ‘Bloody Butcher’ corn would be in the back row, the six-foot-tall red tomatoes situated in front of the corn, and the two-and-one-half-foot-tall red peppers and maybe some red chard in front of the tomatoes. Then I plan the orange-, yellow-, green-, and blue-tone beds in the same manner, from back to front.
Meanwhile, the Hawthorne family, including Noah, Marcy, and baby Sierra, visit and enjoy the Hidden Villa garden under the watchful eye of “The Rainbow Lady” scarecrow.
After selecting the vegetables, I choose ornamental or edible and ornamental flowers in bright primary colors to give an all-over rainbow effect. I intersperse bright, clear red flowers in the red rows, placing the tall varieties in the back and the shorter ones in the front. I place clear orange flowers in the orange row and so on.
Through the years I have designed many rainbow gardens including a preplanned rainbow garden kit for W. Atlee Burpee & Co. I never tire of the process and the fabulous gardens that result. The following pages include specific examples of a few of my rainbow gardens. They include a summer garden at Hidden Villa in Los Alto Hills, California, filled with colorful cutting flowers and vegetables and a few edible flowers, and my own winter Wizard of Oz garden filled with unusual colored vegetables and lots of edible flowers.
[note]
Make sure the flowers you are going to eat are edible and are not sprayed with commercial pesticides unfit for human consumption. The most versatile species in the kitchen and in a rainbow vegetable garden are: borage (blue), broccoli (yellow), calendulas (yellow and orange), chives (lavender), dianthus (red), species mangolds ‘Lemon Gem’ and ‘Tangerine Gem (yellow and orange), mustards (yellow), nasturtiums (orange, yellow, and red), dwarf runner beans ‘Scarlet Bees’ (red), tulips (orange, yellow, lavender, red), violas, pansies, and Johnny-jump-ups (lavender, blue, purple, yellow, and orange).
The Hidden Villa Rainbow Garden
Hidden Villa is a magical place, an oasis of untamed nature in the midst of suburbia. It is the dream of Josephine and Frank Duveneck who envisioned preserving hundreds of wild acres for future generations to enjoy. Thousands of city children visit during the school year. In the summer, Hidden Villa becomes a children’s camp filled with the smell of bay leaves underfoot, and the culinary delights from a very large vegetable garden.
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