I’ve always loved the “idea” of gardening, but never really put too much effort into it until we bought our first home. We had over a year’s worth of renovations to make to it, all of which were exciting and turned out amazing, but I have to admit my favorite part was at the end. Landscaping. It was finally my turn to make the house pretty and give it some curb appeal.
Problem is, we have very limited space. Our lot size is super small so while I would have loved to build a traditional garden in one corner, we would have lost valuable play area for our son. So I had to get creative. How in the world am I going to have flower beds and a large variety of fruits and vegetables without being able to use any yard square footage or ground space at all?!?!
Well for space-saving flower beds, I asked Ben to make some built-in flower boxes along the edge of our front deck/patio. This actually served two purposes. First is a place for me to plant flowers. Second, it is a raised patio/deck and I hated that you could see the dirt and junk underneath. So the beds actually provide a cover-up for this as well!
You can see in the second pic above, the side of the deck is still exposed and initially, I had an Earthbox stand here. But I didn’t care for the way this looks so I went with this option instead!
You can see in the pic above to the right how the snapdragons have grown in nicely! My tomatoes have also really done well in the Earthbox and this is how they look now…
So this took care of one portion of my garden and also my need for beautiful flowers around the house. This solution, as you can see, took up very little space and actually left 100% of the rest of the yard free for “play” area.
With this portion done, my next project was for fruits and veggies. For these I decided to use any and all vertical space available to me and use my fence as the planting area with smaller Earthboxes and simple flower box railing brackets from Home Depot.
I really liked this idea because it keeps my edible plants off the ground – away from harm from bugs, animals, my kid and the lawn mower. I think it looks awful pretty too :)
This even works really well for strawberries! When the plants start to shoot off looking to start new plants, they hang off the sides and when they are long enough, I place them in the planter next to it!
Rarely caught without a camera, Jeana is an adventurous traveler with a passion for people, cultures and food that has led her to 43 countries in 6 years. When she's not using her powers for social good, she enjoys photography, cooking and building LEGOs with her son. On occasion, you may also find her crocheting cute things to hide in her husband's underwear drawer.
13 comments
The best of all is my wife has not visited your site…Ben is very handy it seems and I will continue to walk in his shadow…lol
I like your “herb patch” best of all.
The arbor looks nice as well.
I love them all!!!