It’s more fun than I can usually contain!

Sometimes, though, good accidents occur. Typically at the end of the growing season, I have several leftover plants that I bought for one client or another and then reconsidered.

I jam them into an open spot in my garden to winter over, thinking I will remember in the spring to move them or pot them up again.

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I now have three superb shrubs in pots, a witch hazel, an edgeworthia and a magnolia, and I’m not sure where I will put them. This quandary runs counter to all my sanctimonious advice over the years, but that’s what I get for traveling to Fairweather Gardens, a boutique nursery in Greenwich, a coastal town in South Jersey.

“Gardeners live for novelty,” says Robert Popham, who opened the enterprise with Robert Hoffman in 1992. Since then, business has flourished as the mail-order nursery’s reputation for unusual plants has spread.

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These tender, no-fuss plants offer interesting textures, shapes and colors, creating individually fascinating gardens that, for the most part, thrive on benign neglect.

Less time spent lugging around hoses or watering cans is a very compelling reason for growing several containers filled with these captivating gems.

Gardeners in warmer climates can grow them on walls, in rock gardens, in beds and borders, and containers year-round. However, here in the Midwest, growing them outdoors in containers during the summer is easy; but trying to overwinter them indoors is not.

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Yet those are exactly the sorts of things I’ve found myself saying in the months I’ve been an urban farmer.

A year ago, I didn’t have a vegetable garden. I had a couple of lemon trees, but I’d given up on potted plants, having killed every rooted thing I’d attempted to nurture on my back deck. I didn’t just have a black thumb. I had a black hand.

But last year I began to think that my little postage stamp of a property could do more than just look pretty. Ideally, it could be put to work. I just needed to learn how.

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After years of writing about backyard water features all over the country, I’ve come to think of this artificiality as distinguished by “same-size syndrome.” All the rocks around the pool are either, as the contractors say, “one-” or “two-person” rocks. That’s the number of people it takes to position them.

Sometimes this effect results because you don’t have the money to pay for the equipment that could place really big boulders. But I have also seen same-size syndrome on massive features that took up most of a water gardener’s budget.

If you’re happy with that look, read no more. But if you’d like to improve upon what you have, or if you’re planning a new water feature — and winter’s the best time for making those plans — read on.

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Don’t be put off by how long it takes: Unless you are interested in flowering or fruiting, you can expect plenty of shoot growth from most young trees and shrubs. And even if years are required, shouldn’t some aspects of gardening be a long-term proposition?

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One of the great paradoxes of life is that accomplished gardeners who grow prize-winning roses and gigantic tomatoes frequently turn into grim reapers when it comes to ficus and philodendron indoors.

Gardeners are used to supplying plenty of water and nutrients to their outdoor plants and never have to worry about enough light. Indoors, daily watering and large doses of fertilizer spell disaster. And lack of strong light dooms the healthiest of orchids or staghorn ferns.

Learning the delicate balance of providing just enough water and nutrients and finding the right light in your home for different plants comes with practice. Yes, you’ll kill a few, but you’ll learn. I did.

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They learned, though, as part of a project by a local college to help a community hard-hit by the recession grow some of its own food.

Wilmington College provided the 20 plots and the guidance in this southwestern Ohio town after DHL Express decided last year to close its operation here, putting most of 8,000 Wilmington Air Park employees out of work. Local unemployment has soared to 15 percent.

Food pantries and other charities reported unprecedented demand, so the school, besides using its agricultural program to raise and donate crops, decided it could have a lasting impact by teaching people to garden.

“It’s not about a handout, it’s a hand up,” says Chris Burns-Dibiasio, whose husband, Daniel, is president of the private college of some 1,700 students. “It’s teaching them how to supplement their groceries; it’s about building a local food system.”

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Water features – especially the naturalistic kind with waterfalls, streams or pools – often have planting pockets among the rocks where the soil is already improved and drainage is terrific. These spaces are ideal for bulbs of all kinds.

Also, you could consider other areas around your garden where you’d love to see spring bulbs popping up.

But wait, you say—it’s beyond bulb planting time in your garden. You’ve already hung up your gardening gloves for the season.

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And the answer, in short, is yes. With a basic knowledge of edible plants and guidelines on what can safely be eaten, it isn’t necessary to choose between flowers and food because you can install ornamentals that will double as incredible edible plants.

Edible ornamental landscapes have gained tremendous popularity in the past three decades, fueled by a handful of popular books. Landscape designer Rosalind Creasy published a best-seller on the subject titled “The Complete Book of Edible Landscaping” (Sierra Club, 1982). About a decade later, Cathy Wilkinson Barash’s “Edible Flowers” (Fulcrum, 1993) was published, offering innovative ways to design and prepare edible flowers.

Yet another book that inspired homeowners and landscape designers was “The New Kitchen Garden” by Anna Pavord (Dorling Kindersley, 1996), which promoted ways to plant standard fruits and vegetables as pleasing elements to the eye and palate.

Following are some common landscape plants that I like to integrate into landscape designs. If they are installed now, they’ll grow to become both ornamental and tasty.

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