Courtesy of Matt Lebon
Before founding Custom Foodscapes, Matt Lebon honed his skills managing the EarthDance Organic Farm School in Ferguson.
Matt Lebon has a passion for horticulture that came about in a most unusual way. The St. Louis native didn’t grow up farming or gardening, and he majored in entrepreneurship at Indiana University. It was an assignment with the Peace Corps in Paraguay that brought him to his profession. While working with a cooperative that was there helping sugarcane farmers, he was pulled into what he says was a “world of self-sufficiency”—people growing their own food and building their own homes.
“This idea of connecting with the ecology just blew me away,” he says. “I went to farms that centered on the idea of permaculture, a design methodology that aims to mimic nature. I was hooked.”
Lebon brought his knowledge and enthusiasm back to St. Louis and honed his skills managing the EarthDance Organic Farm School, in Ferguson. “That was where I grew as a professional and saw the demand for people needing help with their food landscapes,” he says.
In 2017, Lebon combined this horticultural experience with his entrepreneurial education to start Custom Foodscaping. His company’s slogan? “Have your landscape and eat it, too.”
“You don’t need to sacrifice beauty to grow edible plants,” says Lebon. “The distinction between what I aim to do with custom foodscaping and what traditionally is thought of as edible gardening is that I’m focused on perennial plants.”
Lebon now spends his days consulting with individuals and organizations on how to design high-yield edible gardens. About half of his projects are residential—clients interested in having access to superior quality and taste that they can’t get at the grocery store, as well as in educating their kids and sharing the experience of growing and picking food fresh from the garden. He also works with organizations and businesses, from restaurants to schools to hospitals; in fact, he partnered with the award-winning restaurant Vicia to create a chef’s garden.
courtesy of Vicia
“They’re trying to create novelty with every dish, so there’s funky fruits and unique shrubs and trees in that landscape, and it’s filled in with edible flowers, and tons of herbs that they use, especially in the bar,” says Lebon. “There’s a mint garden with orange, ginger, and chocolate mint.”
At the Principia School, Lebon designed a permaculture orchard inspired by nature to educate the K-12 students.
“It’s not just straight rows of apple trees. It follows curvilinear lines that go along the contours of the hill,” he says. “There are many kinds of tree species, and then, in between, there’s myriad different native flowers, bunch grasses, and ground covers that fill in every niche of the growing space.”
During planting season, Lebon’s day entails loading and dropping off supplies, coordinating compost and soil deliveries, planting and mulching, and consulting with clients. The designer uses lots of native plants and those that thrive in our region, such as pawpaw, hybrid persimmon, bush cherry, serviceberry, fig, and Asian pear.
His biggest challenge may be patience. “Planting trees and shrubs takes a while to come into bearing, so people have to be willing to wait,” he says.
Lebon is skilled in marrying functionality and good design. “If the idea of foodscaping is only seen as something that’s wild or unkempt, then we don’t stand to expand the movement and infiltrate the mainstream, and that’s definitely my goal.”
