If you're growing in small spaces like I do and have, although I now have a little bit more space at my new homestead, you need plants that do more than one thing.

Now, far bit for me to tell you what to grow, you can grow anything you want,

but if you do want to maximize, then instead of trying to cram more plants in the same space,

sometimes you can grow one plant that does more than one thing.

So it kind of, not really, but kind of is like growing two plants.

So just some ideas here for you.

First of all, the entire world of herbs is a fantastic double or even triple duty style plan.

Of course there's the culinary use, there's the beauty of them, there's the deterrence of

pests at least for some of those types of herbs. Then if you let them flower, they are

pollinator attractants. Of course they also just smell good. And if you are into the medicinal

uses, which I'm certainly not as experienced with as I would like to be,

then there's that as well.

So there's almost like a quintuple or sextuple use type of plant.

Next you have one that at least here in San Diego grows very much

like a weed and that would be Nastertium. So Nastertium is a great salad plant. The flowers

are both ornamental and beautiful as well as edible, and it does have a bit of an attractant quality for things like aphids or white flies.

So you can put it on the border of your garden and it will attract

those pests instead of those pests being attracted to other parts of the garden.

Something like bamboo is a really interesting one because it has an immense amount of

ornamental use. You can use it for incredibly thick hedging and incredibly tall hedging if you do want to create some sort of

privacy going on, but if you decide to harvest it, you can turn it into fabric, fiber.

You can eat the shoots, the young shoots can be eaten, and in fact they're one of my favorite things to have

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