Having a small yard doesn’t mean you need to choose between a nice lawn and vegetable or flower gardens. With space saving garden design, it is possible to increase the curb appeal of your house with landscaping or grow a small vegetable garden without sacrificing all your lawn space. Small gardens can be just as attractive as larger landscape designs, and are often easier to maintain.
Vertical Vegetable Gardening
One of the best ways to save space in a small yard is with vertical gardening. Instead of spreading plants out in traditional landscape beds, you can maximize space by training plants up structures like walls, trellises, and fences. Hanging containers are also useful, whether attached to a wall or suspended from overhead structures.
Vines are the easiest plants to train up a vertical surface, and there are vining varieties available for many types of vegetables. Peas, pole beans, cucumbers, tomatoes, melons, summer squash, winter squash, and pumpkins call all be trained up a trellis or fence. For larger vegetables like melon, squashes, and cucumbers, the fruits can be supported with a sling tied to the trellis.
Container gardening is a good way to save space when vegetable gardening. To take advantage of vertical space, you can use hanging baskets or attach pots on walls. Container-sized plants like lettuce, small tomatoes, and certain varieties of beets, carrots, cabbage, broccoli, eggplant, beans, and peppers all do well in containers.
Space-Saving Landscaping
There are several ways to use limited space in ornamental landscapes. As with vegetable gardening, it is a good idea to make use of vertical space. Columnar varieties of evergreen and ornamental trees can provide strong upward lines in the landscape design, but will not take up much space. Flowering and fruit trees can be trained along walls as espaliers.
Flowering plants like clematis, climbing roses, wisteria, and trumpet vine will grow up trellises or fences and take up less ground space. You can opt for smaller varieties of certain plants, such as miniature roses instead of hybrid teas. Choosing compact, shrubby plants instead of sprawling, spreading varieties will also help save space. With a little research in to the maximum size of each plant, you’ll be able to plan a garden that won’t outgrow the available space.
Even with a small yard or limited garden space, it is still possible to have a lovely landscape and grow your own vegetables. Vertical gardening, containers, and miniature or columnar varieties of plants will help save space when gardening. With careful planning, there is room in even a small yard for both lawn and landscaping.
