What are you thankful for today? Today, I am thankful for my new garden up the road – a borrowed garden in someone else’s yard that is so much sunnier than my own. I’ve been having a lot of fun experimenting with mulching techniques and garden design.
In my own small garden, I’ve had to be quite creative about space. I live in a townhouse with a tiny yard, and my tiny yard doesn’t really have room for a big garden bed. For a few years, I tried having a garden bed, but it just didn’t make sense. It was hard to reach into the bed, and installing a path meant that I lost almost half of my garden space.
It’s fall now, and this is the perfect time to rethink your garden for the new year. Yes, fall is the start of the gardening season. And you thought that it was spring, didn’t you? While spring is a time for planting, it’s best to plan before you plant. If you’re hoping to have some delicious homegrown squash at next year’s Thanksgiving feast, the time to build soil and redesign your garden is right now.
Two space-savvy gardening techniques are the keyhole bed and the spiral. While rectangular and square beds satisfy those who are angle-inclined, they have very little going for them space-wise. To avoid making pathways in the garden, you need to make a rectangular bed very thin so that you can reach into the middle of the garden. This is not particularly savvy if you have limited space.
How about curving that bed around into a u-shape? Then you’ll have a keyhole bed. If you have a sunny corner of the garden, create a bed that you can step into. A u-shaped bed allows you to reach all of the plants in the bed by standing in the hole that is in the middle of the bed.
If you’re in a building mood, create a spiral bed with rocks or bricks. Start at ground level and add soil and rocks, gradually making the bed higher as it spirals around. The bed will look like a snail shell. This form is ideal for a herb bed, because it creates an area with a number of different microclimates. Shade-loving plants can go near the base or on the shadier side of the spiral, while sun-loving plants can go on the top. The rocks hold heat for the plants.
What space-savvy gardening methods have you used?
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