Whether you love fresh produce, beautiful blooms or both, growing your own plants can be a very rewarding activity. Planning your garden before you start digging can make the whole process smoother, leading to a bountiful harvest or a gorgeous display. Here are some tips for plotting and arranging your next garden.
Consider how your garden will affect the appearance of your space. While it’s easy to integrate flowers and ornamental plants into your landscape design, a vegetable garden can take up a significant amount of lawn space, depending on how much you grow, and it can easily become unruly and unkempt. You can reduce the footprint and enhance the design of a vegetable garden by using containers or terraces and keeping the space free of weeds.
Your budget is another consideration. Determine how much you can afford to spend, not only on the initial expenses of the garden, but on long-term care and maintenance. Vegetables can be grown for very little money, especially if you start them from seed rather than purchasing seedlings, but don’t forget other expenses like fertilizer, water, pesticides and other products you may need. When planting flowers and other ornamental plants, perennials are more budget-friendly than annuals, because they come back year after year.
In addition to your financial budget, think about the amount of time you can devote to your garden. Not only do you have to plant your seeds, starts or flowers, but you have to weed, prune, water, pluck and harvest, depending upon what you plant. You will also have to process and preserve veggies that you can’t eat immediately, which is something to think about. Choosing low-maintenance plants or vegetables can reduce the amount of time you have to devote to your garden, as can thorough mulching to keep weeds at bay. When planting vegetables, you can stagger plants by putting them in the ground a week or so apart to prevent all of your produce from ripening at once.
One way to reduce the amount of time that your garden takes up is to line up help ahead of time. Your spouse, children or grandchildren can help water plants and pick veggies, or they could pull weeds and trim bushes. If your budget allows, you may consider hiring professional landscapers or even a neighborhood teenager to help care for your lawn and garden.
Finally, make sure that you research the plants you wish to grow to ensure that your space is appropriate for them. Some plants do not thrive well in certain climates, and others will have different needs when it comes to soil, sunlight and water. For instance, a vegetable garden should be located in a sunny region, generally, while some ornamental flowers and plants do best in partial shade. While some plants thrive in loose, sandy soil, others need heavier, richer dirt to establish solid root systems.
Taking the time to plan and research before planting a garden can save you the hassles and expense of losing plants or establishing beds that you don’t really like. While some might like to dig right in, a little plotting can enhance your yields and the beauty of your garden.