A lot of deliberation goes into your custom luxury home. Location, design, color, and layout: you want everything to be perfect. You watch as the foundation is built, the walls go up, and the little details come together to make a mass of wood, metal, and concrete your home. You expect a lot out of your custom built home: it needs to be the perfect spot for lazy nights around the television, dinner parties, family reunions, holiday memories, and a simple and quiet place to retreat to after a long day. You want to be away from it all, yet close to work, and the activities and enjoyment that Pittsburgh and its beautiful suburbs have to offer. You want good neighbors and friends for your kids, but you want privacy. In short, you want your custom built home to be beautiful and functional.
The same can be true of your garden. Function and beauty do not need to be exclusive, yet you see it everywhere: beautiful front yard gardens, with splashes of color and deep foliage, and functional gardens delegated to the back yard, neighboring the trashcans and the shed. This doesn’t have to be the case. Pittsburgh weather is perfectly suited for a variety of fruits, vegetables and herbs. There are even varieties of kiwi that can withstand the cold Pittsburgh area winters. With so many beautiful and delicious options for your garden, why would you want to stick to just ornamental plants?
Vegetables: Functional and Beautiful
Many of today’s most “functional” plants were considered decorative in the past. Tomato plants, once thought to be entirely poisonous, adorned upscale gardens for the appeal of their curious red fruit. Cucumber plants, with their beautiful yellow flowers, climbed walls and porches. These plants, both beautiful and functional, don’t deserve to be delegated to the back yard. With a little work and imagination, your beautiful blooming garden could be full of fruits, vegetables and herbs.
Luckily, as do-it-yourself projects go, adding functional plants to your garden is relatively easy. Perhaps the easiest way to introduce produce to your garden is the trellis. Instead of training ivy or climbing roses, introduce cucumbers, squash, runner beans, sugar snap peas, or any other climbing vegetable. Cucumbers have striking yellow flowers and beautiful leaves, beans and peas are beautiful with delicate leaves and white flowers. These are beautiful, unique alternatives to adorn your trellis.
Adding Color with Fruits and Vegetables
If adding hardware to your garden isn’t an option, there are plenty of other simple DIY ways of incorporating functional plants in with your ornamental ones. From gorgeous greens to beautiful blooms, there are functional plants to fill almost every niche and palate.
Many people satisfy a desire for deep, striking foliage with hostas, ferns, or ornamental grasses. For the hybrid gardener, you can supplement with cabbage, leek, kale, squash, or green onions. If you’re looking to fill a shady patch with plants, many herbs happily adapt to shady environments.
Adding functional plants to your garden can add plenty of color. Consider eggplants, purple cabbage, squash, peppers or strawberries. Both the flower and the fruit of the eggplant are beautiful and lend color to a garden. Purple cabbage is a great focal point, and has been used to decades as a decorative plant. Squash produce beautiful yellow flowers, and eventually beautiful fruit, and pepper plants come in myriad varieties, producing giant peppers to delicate ones of all colors, from green to red to purple. Strawberries, aside from producing delicious fruit, are beautiful and colorful. Combine any of these plants with a scattering of wild flowers to add extra color and complexity to your garden.
Gardening Tips for a Safe, Enjoyable Experience
While designing your garden, there are several points to keep in mind to ensure a beautiful, functional, and safe gardening experience.
Be careful mixing toxic plants with edible ones. Even though you might never mistake rhododendron for an edible plant, friends, family, or even the local neighborhood kids who secretly enjoy your small strawberry patch, might not be so savvy. Especially worrisome would be any toxic plant that has berries: best to avoid these plants, or relegate them to a strictly ornamental garden to prevent accidents.
Plants need differing amounts of light, so when planning your hybrid garden, keep in mind the pattern of the sun over your house, the final height your plants will be, and how their location receives or blocks light.
Harvesting plants will change the appearance of your garden. For this reason, it is not recommended that “whole-harvest” plants, such as cabbage, be planted in clusters or rows. After harvest, such areas would be empty, throwing off the dynamic of the garden. Whole harvest plants work best in a grouping with other no-harvest or partial-harvest plants, to ensure visual interest even after you’ve enjoyed the fruits of your labor.
Finally, if there are plants you want but can’t quite incorporate into your garden, there are other options. Long for a fig tree, but find that Pittsburgh is just too cold in the winter? A tasteful planter allows the young tree warm summers outside, but cold winter sheltered in the house, while the pot prevents the tree from becoming too large. Pots are also great for displaying plants you couldn’t fit into your garden, or plants you might want to keep closer to your kitchen.
The biggest asset in creating a hybrid garden is an open mind. Consider plants individually. Where a large pepper plant might look ridiculous, a small chili pepper plant might look divine. Where kale might be overpowering, a patch of basil might bring everything together. Research what plants are able to survive our region (Pittsburgh is in zone 6 of the hardiness scale), and try out new, exciting plants. Enjoy your garden! And remember, just like your custom luxury home, just because it’s beautiful doesn’t mean it can’t be functional.
1) It’s Called “Living Space” for a Reason
Spring might be everyone’s favorite season, but for realtors, builders, and anyone with their house on the market Spring is by absolutely the Most Wonderful Time of the Year (Sorry Christmas!)
April showers bring more than just May flowers! Rain can bring out the worst in a home. From areas of standing water in your yard, to leaky basements, clogged gutters, and if your home is really outdated you may have the ol’ indoor waterfall. Be sure to patch up, repair and prevent any of these issues. General contractors and the internet are both great resources. 
If you are a first time home owner than chances are you are a first time member of a Home Owner’s Association. When the covenant is upheld by all of the home owners in a neighborhood, you can anticipate some great benefits:
As a whole, our society has become very environmentally friendly, but what are you doing as an individual to help reduce your carbon footprint? 
Thinking about painting your home this spring? Before you run to the local home repair store to pick up a gallon of paint or give your final selections to a professional, you might want to check out the latest color trends for 2010. PPG Industries’ 
