Fall is a great time to work on your landscaping, and what could be better than incorporating edible plants into your landscape? Not only will your yard look great, it will also provide tasty eats!

If you love the idea of growing your own food, it shouldn’t be too much of a stretch to consider incorporating plants that provide nourishment into your permanent landscape features. After all, your garden doesn’t have to begin and end with the garden season! Why not add some edible plant ideas into your year-round landscaping? These 5 plants provide delicious fruits for your family to enjoy, and they also look beautiful in your yard!

There’s no better time than fall to update your landscaping. Try these five ideas this fall instead of (or along with) the usual flowering trees and shrubs:

Integrating food plants throughout your landscape—as opposed to confining them to rows in the back corner of the yard—requires thinking about them in a different way. The easiest approach is substitution: For a large deciduous shade tree, consider a pecan instead of an oak. Want to plant a row of small trees with showy spring flowers along the front fence? Try fruiting cherries instead of the fruitless ornamental ones….

1. Berry Hedge

Blueberry bushes (USDA zones 3 to 10, depending on the variety) provide more than just fruit; they can also screen off the yard from neighbors or add a bit of greenery to the walls of your house as a foundation planting. They have a tidy, dense growth habit and from a distance look like any other of a dozen common hedge plants. Up close, the delicate urn-shaped white flowers in spring, and the powder blue berries in fall are undeniably beautiful….

2. Apple Allée with Herbs

An allée is a planting of parallel rows of trees on either side of a path, driveway, or road. By using apple trees (USDA zones 3 to 10, depending on the variety) for an allée—which have delicate pink-tinged blossoms that emerge on their still bare branches in March and April—you’ll have a magical tunnel filled with flower petals in early spring and fruit to fill your cupboard with in late summer and early fall. Dwarf apples cast little shade around them, allowing you to plant beds of rosemary, lavender, and sage beneath them….

3. Mediterranean Oasis

Olives (USDA zones 9 to 11), figs (USDA zones 7 to 11), and grapes (USDA zones 4 to 10, depending on the variety) make fantastic culinary combinations, but they also work well together in the landscape…. Olives have delicate grey-green leaves and gnarled trunks with age; they can be trained as trees or maintained as an evergreen hedge. Figs have enormous leaves with an iconic shape and will grow as a tree or shrub. Grapevines are a classic plant for training over an arbor or a pergola, creating a shady oasis for an afternoon meal….

4. Vegetable Parterre

Vegetable beds have a reputation for being unruly and are a part of the landscape that is often screened off from view. It doesn’t have to be that way, however; it’s all a matter of how you frame them. One approach is to model your vegetable garden on the idea of a French parterre garden, a formal garden design where beds are neatly delineated in a symmetrical shape…. Use decorative gravel for the pathways, plant an evergreen herb (like sage, rosemary, or lavender) for the border, and surround the area with a low picket fence for a quaint, tidy, and productive vegetable garden….

5. Edible Flower Border

Flower gardens can provide more than food for hummingbirds, butterflies, and bumblebees—many flowers are edible and make a dainty addition to salads and other dishes. Nasturtium, calendula, pansies, borage, marigolds, and daylilies are a few of the tastiest….

Get more tips from this article at ModernFarmer.com…