Edible landscape in Atlantic Beach

Our clients built a beautiful house in Atlantic Beach, just blocks from sand and water, and wanted to build a beautiful Florida-friendly tropical food forest to match their home’s modern, functional vibe. The design was shaped by the unique Atlantic beach building codes and existing shed, chicken coop and raised bed garden already in place!

This landscape is a total tropical food forest. The clients are already successful vegetable gardeners so we filled their remaining spaces with as many perennial edibles as we could think of. The existing yard had several different light exposures so we were able to plant a huge variety of edibles. As always we snuck an Arborquina olive into the mix, we also found space for: Guava, Chickasaw Plum, 6 varieties of bananas, 7 varieties of ginger, 3 varieties of blueberries, Barbados cherry, papaya, self-pollinating kiwis and thornless blackberries! We surrounded this forest of food with several pollinator friendly flowers such as salvias, Firebush, cupheas and flowering vines like bignonia and passion vine. The entire complex of food and structures is connected with a long narrow path built from compacted limestone and pressure treated edging. We used the geometry of the path to create our garden bed and also utilized its boundaries to remove challenging maintenance areas along the fence and around utilities.

Being a perennial food forest there is far less maintenance involved for food production. The large pallet of plants used span a large variety of plant types. From the nearly annual lifespan of papaya and bananas to long lived specimens like olives and blueberries this garden will change along side our clients. We removed several high maintenance areas and reduced the overall area of mowed/trimmed space.

It’s incredibly exciting building productive kitchen gardens for motivated families. I have no doubt these clients will be able to utilize our design to the max and produce a large quantity and variety of home grown edibles for many years to come. (Photos coming soon!)