Fine Gardening

Archive for the ‘Garden Design’ Category

Veggies from home garden

There is nothing more satisfying that serving up a dinner made with the fruits (and vegetables) of your labors.  If you have a vegetable garden and are able to bring plants from seeds to the dinner table there is truly nothing more satisfying.  However, getting to that point is a long road.  This road is only as difficult as you make it.  You will find that with a good vegetable garden design you will more easily be able to grow good vegetables.

Most of your planning for your vegetable garden design needs to be from a utilitarian standpoint.  After all, the primary point of your garden is not to look pretty; it is to provide you with tasty vegetables.  In order to plant your vegetables and keep them free from weeds and insects throughout their growing season, you need have easy access to every corner or your garden.  Traditional vegetable garden design, when farmers would devote an entire acre to growing food for the whole year, is laid out in long, narrow rows.  These rows were as wide as they can be so long as the farmer could reach all the way across them while hoeing, weeding, and applying insecticides.

The concept of easy access is still principle to modern vegetable garden design, but most of us don’t have the luxury of devoting that much space to vegetable cultivation.  Instead we are cramming our gardens into tiny urban plots or the corner of the backyard not already taken up by the swing set.  This means that long, narrow rows are rarely an option.  Instead, why not try thinking of your vegetable garden as a square and the beds as the four thick lines that make up the square.  Leave yourself a tiny “door” into the plot, and then by simply turning in a circle you can easily access all four beds.  You could also try creating a walkway that is lined with vegetables.  If you live in a city and want to plant on a concrete pad or on a room, make the walkway out of raised planters.  Then you also have the option of decorating the side of your planters.

Once the logistics of your vegetable garden design are figured out, you can concentrate on the aesthetics.  Even here, you need to make sure that you don’t pair plants, such as coriander and pumpkins that would crowd each other out.  But you can create your vegetable garden design with an eye toward what is visually pleasing.  Many people like to edge the side of their beds with herbs or low growing vegetables like cabbage or lettuce.  Alternate staking your tomatoes and your beans as they flower and grow vegetables of different colors.  If you choose to use wooden stakes you could even paint them for some added decoration.  If you are going to grow pumpkins or squash, exploit their beautiful blossoms while they last.  Give them both plenty of space to show off as well as plenty of space to grow.  Many times your vegetable garden design can combine both practical and artistic considerations.

blueberry plant

Growing a vegetable garden can either be rewarding or frustrating.  It is rewarding if the seeds you put into the ground in the spring turn into carrots, cauliflower, and beans in the fall.  It is frustrating if you spend your entire summer digging in the dirt and in the end have nothing to show for it but a few wilted lettuce leaves and a lot of insects and fungus.  The only way that you can hope to succeed in your gardening endeavors is to have a good vegetable garden plan.  Taking a few days to research and plan your vegetable garden will save you months of hard work trying to coax something to grow that isn’t suited to your climate.

The vegetable garden plans should start out with the types of vegetables that are best suited to your climate.  Whether you live in a cold, temperate, sub-tropical, or tropical climate there are certain vegetables that will thrive and others that will rot on the vine.  At the same time, many vegetables can grow regardless of your overall climate as long as they are planted at the right time of the year.  For example, you can plant most tubers and root vegetables, such as carrots, radishes, and potatoes as soon as they deep frosts are over.  These vegetables are hardy and will survive in the ground even if they get a couple of cold nights before spring really kicks in.  However, vine vegetables such as tomatoes and beans shouldn’t be sown until the frosts are well and truly over and the growing season is in full spring.  If you live in the far north, you may find that you growing season isn’t long enough to accommodate vine vegetables.  If you get early frosts, don’t take chances as there is nothing worse than spending a summer growing tomatoes only to have them be killed by an early frost.

A vegetable garden plan

When to sow your vegetables is an important part in your vegetable garden plan, but it is only one of many points to consider.  You also need to think about the sunlight that you garden gets.  Try, if at all possible to position your garden so that it gets at least five hours of sunlight per day.  Also, plan your vegetable garden to ensure that taller plants don’t block the sunlight needed by smaller plants.  Generally you can accomplish this by positioning your tall plants on the northern side of your garden.  You also need to think about the amount of wind that you garden will get to create an effective vegetable garden plan.  Hot wind can dry out your soil and cold wind can freeze your plants.  In fact, any wind will tear up your topsoil; just think of the Dust Bowl.  If you don’t have natural wind breaks, plant some scrubs or put of some fencing around your vegetable garden.

As long as you take the time to research, your vegetable garden plans should ensure that by the end of the summer you are bringing in mountains of delicious vegetables for your family to enjoy.

Beautiful flower garden design

Flowers are an important part of our culture.  Every flower has a distinctive history and meaning.  Most special occasions are marked with the giving of flowers.  Even a small pot of flowers on the corner of a desk or in a windowsill can brighten up an entire room.  Planting flowers outside is not only a fun activity, but it also brings you rewards for a full season at a time.  Flower garden design gives you a chance to paint with living creatures and create a three-dimensional world of color and smell that should delight you and your friends all summer long.

Flower garden design should start in the staid realm of geometry.  It may be difficult to imagine flowers conforming to the rigid Euclidean rules you learned in school, but a good flower garden design should always have a plan.  Even if it looks as though the flowers are growing naturally, there was still some careful thought put into their initial placement.  Use geometry to decide on the initial shape of your flower bed.  Maybe you would like to try something with concentric circles at various heights.  Perhaps you want to base your garden on an octagon with eight different triangular sections filled in with eight different kinds of flowers.  Or maybe you’re going to scrap traditional geometry all together and create an undulating oblong shape that is filled in irregular patches.  NO matter what you decide, make sure you sketch out your basic floor plan before you begin.

Children's garden for the future

After you have the basic shape of your flower garden design, it is time to think about levels.  Different flowers grow to different heights, and if you plant your sunflowers at the front of your bed and your ‘impatients’ at the back, no one will ever them.  As you plan your flower garden design strive to use as many different levels of flowers as possible, but always keep your tallest plants where they will not obstruct the view of the other plants, either at the back of a bed facing a wall or the middle of a bed the has access from all four sides.

If you didn’t already have enough to consider when planning your flower garden design, you also need to make sure that you are picking flower combinations that will look good all season long.  This means that not all your flowers should bloom in the early spring.  Instead get some tulips for early spring, some sunflowers for the height of summer, and some chrysanthemums for the falls.  This ensures that there will be color in your garden all year long.  Getting some long blooming flowers, such as marigolds is also a good idea.  They are low enough to line the edges of your beds and will give you a bright spot of color from spring to fall.

Successful flower garden design means finding the right place of shapes, heights, and blossoms to keep your garden looking great regardless of the season.  It also involves having a clear picture of your finished garden from the time you turn your first trowel-full of earth.