The Adlers grow tomatoes, basil, eggplant, peppers, gourmet lettuces, and other foods in their ravineside plot, which is cleverly terraced alongside the house. The garden is small but its rewards are abundant, and not only at mealtime. "Before, we lived in a townhouse. I didn't know anything about gardens," Stephanie says. "This is our first experience with a vegetable garden, and it has been wonderful for the children to see something they started to grow reach fruition."

Stephanie, 8-year-old Carly, and 5-year-old Isabelle are not alone in their acquired taste for the kitchen garden. Homegrown vegetables, fruits, herbs, and edible flowers — long-time staples in many North Shore gardens — are gaining renewed interest as people become more concerned about which pesticides or fertilizers may have been used on grocery store produce. (Annual sales of organic foods in this country surpass $9 billion.)

Experienced gardeners are becoming smarter at growing food in our mercurial Chicago climate and are creating lavish plots in rather tight spaces. No longer hidden behind the shed or garage, kitchen gardens — which include vegetables, fruits and herbs — are now seen as artful landscape features.

Alana Mezo, a senior horticulturist at the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe, oversees the botanical museum's Regenstein Fruit & Vegetable Garden. She has noticed a marked increase in the number of visitors to the nearly four acres of colorful vegetable, fruit, and herb plantings. "Gardening is the number one hobby in this country," Mezo says. "Also, I think people want a little more control over their produce, and they want to know where it comes from."

The Regenstein garden at the Chicago Botanic displays hundreds of edible plants, and each year Mezo, her assistant and volunteer gardeners experiment with unique varieties. (Mezo orders her seed from retail catalogs, so home gardeners shouldn't think that exotic examples are out of reach.) She plants them in unexpected combinations, showing home gardeners that work-horse vegetable gardens can also be attractive.

One of her favorite combos is low-growing nasturtium — both its flowers and leaves are eaten — bordering a mix of 4-foot-tall sunflowers and patio-sized tomatoes and sweet peppers. "Mixing edible flowers and herbs in with your vegetables, rather than planting everything in rows, gives a cottage garden feel," Mezo says.

Last year, she had luck with edibles in a garden layered with non-edible plants. Making a happy first appearance was the heirloom collard green Green Glaze. Its light green, flat glossy leaves and spread of 3 feet make it a good ornamental. (If grown for show as well as food, the leaves should not be harvested from the top or the plant's growth will be stunted, Mezo notes.)

More proof that many edibles can be grown for their looks alone is dinosaur kale Lacinato, which Mezo placed at the vegetable garden's main entrance. She planted the nutritious Italian heirloom with herbs: lavender, Anise hyssop, and mint, and the edible flowers nasturtium, marigold, and pinks. The kale has long, narrow and curling dark green and blue-gray leaves and grows to about 4 feet. (Again, don't pick from the top to keep the plant looking good.) "It was just absolutely gorgeous," Mezo says. "Everyone walking by had to touch it."

New this year will be space-saving tomatoes and sweet peppers bred to drape over the sides of small pots, hanging baskets and window boxes, and beans with colorful seedpods. Mezo has clever, good-looking ways to help along the garden. For staking, she uses only bamboo, purchased in 8-foot lengths and cut to size, because the poles are long and strong enough to support a plant's eventual height and weight.

She grows melon on a trellis — a smart "vertical gardening" technique for those with limited space — and recycles plastic mesh onion bags into hammocks to hold the fruit which, when too heavy (about 6 pounds), threatens to snap from the vine before ripening. In the pumpkin patch, she fashions cute straw nests to cushion the ripening pumpkins, protecting their bottoms from rot by allowing air circulation.

Emo Amidei in his tomato patch

Alice Goltra of Lake Forest is another gardener who appreciates the design potential of edible plants. Goltra has rebuilt the kitchen garden she and spouse Ren inherited in 1976 when they purchased their 1920s home on four acres. The large vegetable area was part of a 1928 design by noted local landscape architect Marshall Johnson for the previous owners, who used the plot as a victory garden during World War II. Working with Lake Bluff landscape architect P. Clifford Miller, Goltra has turned the garden into a space with strong formal lines softened by a pleasing mix of flowers and vegetables. She describes it as "a circle in square." Four stone pathways radiate from a center crabapple tree to an outer path, which encircles the tree and four pie-shape planting beds. Stone benches rest at the end of three paths. (The tree and benches were gifts from Ren's mother.) The fourth, main path is flanked by two stunning rhubarb plants, a gift from a fellow garden clubber, and each path is lined on both sides with peonies.

The entrance is marked by two rustic fenceposts, a charming contrast to the garden's formality, and the entire garden is enclosed by a square of yellow-flowering Cornelian cherry trees espaliered against a wire fence. (Espalier is the French word for training trees and shrubs to grow flat against a support. While the technique saves space, and the results can be lovely, it takes patience and skill and is not for the beginner, notes Mezo of the Botanic Garden. Already-started young espaliered fruit trees are available in nurseries and through mail-order catalogs.)

What Goltra grows in the pie-shaped beds depends on the sunlight they get, and on her mood the previous winter as she plows through garden books and seed catalogs. Last season, she grew her usual tomatoes, but planted asparagus along with them, because she learned the asparagus' airy leaves cast little shade while, at the same time, their stems support the tomato vines.

When Goltra's kitchen garden was scheduled to be shown on a garden walk, she spent months planning the combinations, which included an intricate pattern of red and green lettuces grown from seed. (Because she considers foliage as important a design element as flowers, most of her plants are purchased at nurseries so she can see the leaves.) "This is the artistic side of gardening," Goltra says. "The garden looks so pretty when you look down from the second floor windows. And when it is a pretty garden, you go out there more often and take care of it." The thought that goes into choosing plants for their produce, site tolerance, and looks can be mind boggling, Goltra says. "I don't know whether it makes you a good gardener," she says with a laugh, "but it makes you feel like a good planner."

Emo Amidei's Highland Park vegetable garden is designed with a practical hand. With the tomatoes and beans twining overhead along the metal hoops and the richly-colored patches of cabbage and Italian lettuce at the vines' feet, the plot's beauty is a happy accident.

Amidei, 66, has been growing vegetables at this house for nearly 30 years, but he has gardened since he was a child on his family's farm in Italy. His garden started as a rear corner patch, but "little by little, every year it gets bigger," Amidei says with a chuckle, pointing to the low concrete block wall he built to keep himself from making the garden bigger. Pretty herbs are scattered about the small back yard, in pots and bordering the garage and patio.

Amidei visits his native country every other year, bringing back the authentic Italian seed he will use for his garden. He also collects seed from his garden. He grows radishes, string beans, green, red and jalapeno peppers, basil, parsley, carrots, zucchini, celery, swiss chard, eggplant, at least four kinds of tomatoes — an amazing array considering the garden's compact size.

Amidei visits his native country every other year, bringing back the authentic Italian seed he will use for his garden.

Each spring, Amidei starts 1,000 tomato seedlings, setting aside 85 for himself. Family members and friends line up for the rest. "Every year, I ask him, "Why do you plant so many?''' jokes his wife Assunta, who uses the bounty to make traditional Italian foods, including freezers full of minestrone, pesto and marinara sauce. "I tell him, "I've got enough. Life isn't just about tomatoes.'''

Amidei claims to have no secrets. He plants most of his seeds in flats around Easter — "on the low moon." The seeds germinate in a covered greenhouse. Then, around Memorial Day, off comes the greenhouse cover and the seedlings are plugged into the beds that make up the floor of the greenhouse and extend outside. He fertilizes with compost and sheep manure, using no chemicals. He waters the garden every day (morning is best, he says), and ignores leaf-munching Japanese beetles, "because there is nothing you can do." He adds: "Everything tastes better from the garden." Even with a few beetle nips.

Stephanie Adler agrees. At her family's 1998 traditional-style house, on a quiet lane a short walk from Lake Michigan, she hopes to give her landscape a feeling of instant age by working with Chicago garden designer Jon-Michael Hansen, who installed large foundation plantings, climbers on the stucco-like walls, and window boxes overflowing with annuals.

But the vegetable garden, tucked against the east side of the house, is Stephanie's pride. She originally wanted to grow a few vegetables and herbs for her cooking. Her standbys now include cucumbers, beans, cauliflower, and herbs such as dill, lemon grass and rosemary. (Many of the herbs she dries; like the Amideis, she has enough homemade pesto to last the winter.) A purveyor friend once said that Adler's seed-grown arugula, romaine, and bibb lettuces could grace the plates of the finest area restaurants. The Adlers also grow strawberries, and a young pear tree is trained against a wall. Most of the plants are purchased from nurseries and are planted after Mother's Day if the weather is amenable. To keep down weeding, a job the children often do, a weed-proof liner is laid after the plants are in place and then is covered with bark mulch.

The plants get a shot of commercial plant food after planting, and then the chemical treatments stop because Stephanie wants to be careful what she feeds her family. Other than that, her secret is simply "a lot of water." She explains: "It's so nice to be able to come into the garden and cut the fresh herbs for dinner. It all tastes so incredible, you can really tell the difference in the quality. It's a lot of work, but it's a labor of love."

A strip of hosta and hydrangea opposite the vegetable garden was dug up last fall, doubling the room for vegetables, and doubling Stephanie's excitement.

Her interest in vegetable gardening has fed a growing passion.

Laurie Grano gardens in Libertyville.