Edible Landscape Company in Santa Cruz, CA
Orchard Keepers is an edible landscape company based in Santa Cruz, CA, providing home orchard care, edible landscape design and installation, and ongoing garden maintenance to homeowners throughout the city. Since 2004, our team has designed, built, and cared for fruit trees, kitchen gardens, and ecological landscapes across Santa Cruz neighborhoods from the Westside to DeLaveaga, working with the coastal fog, sandy soils, and mixed terrain that shape what grows well here. Whether you're planting a first orchard or maintaining an established edible landscape, our crews are based locally and available throughout Santa Cruz.
Home Orchard Care in Santa Cruz
Fruit trees are where our company began, and home orchard care in Santa Cruz remains built around the same seasonal rhythm: pruning, feeding, thinning, and organic pest and disease management timed to each tree's calendar. Santa Cruz's coastal microclimates call for variety selection suited to fog and moderate temperatures, and twenty years in this city has taught our team which varieties perform best in specific neighborhoods. Most Santa Cruz orchards do well on a monthly maintenance visit, and home orchard installation is available for properties starting from scratch.
Edible Landscape Design & Installation in Santa Cruz
An edible landscape installation in Santa Cruz typically brings several elements together into one design: fruit trees and kitchen gardens, native and drought-tolerant plantings suited to coastal conditions, garden structures and hardscape, such as pathways and arbors, and Irrigation system built around the planting plan. Food-producing garden systems like raised beds are often part of the mix as well. Every project starts with a design phase tailored to the site, since sun, slope, and soil vary considerably between Santa Cruz's coastal and inland neighborhoods.
Ongoing Landscape & Garden Maintenance in Santa Cruz
Santa Cruz properties with established plantings rely on our maintenance team for vegetable and kitchen garden care, healthy soil management, irrigation system management, and integrated pest management, scheduled monthly, bi-weekly, or weekly depending on the property. We work organically throughout, using OMRI-approved materials when treatment is needed. Sandy coastal soils and fog-belt growing conditions call for a different maintenance approach than inland Santa Cruz County properties see, and our team adjusts accordingly.
About Santa Cruz, CA
Santa Cruz is a coastal city in Santa Cruz County, home to the University of California, Santa Cruz and its redwood-forested campus above the Pogonip open space. The city spans zip codes 95060 through 95065, bordered by the Pacific Ocean to the south and the Santa Cruz Mountains to the north, with neighborhoods ranging from the Westside near Natural Bridges State Park and Lighthouse Field State Beach to DeLaveaga Park and the San Lorenzo River corridor running through downtown. Highway 1 and Mission Street connect the city's neighborhoods, which range from dense beachside lots to wooded hillside properties in the hills above campus. That range, from sandy coastal yards to shaded mountain properties, means fruit trees and edible gardens perform very differently from one Santa Cruz neighborhood to the next.
Other Service Areas
In addition to Santa Cruz, Orchard Keepers provides edible landscape and home orchard services near Santa Cruz County, Los Gatos, Saratoga, Portola Valley, and Atherton.