Discover the most important tips for designing the best gardens
How can you approach a small home garden design project? What gardening tools should you buy? What tools do you not need to buy? And how can you make the exterior design of your home look like it was designed by gardening and landscape experts? Sometimes, when you start setting up a home garden, you have many expectations that make you start thinking, measuring, distributing, and choosing the most suitable gardening equipment, etc.
Today in this article we want to help you design or repair your garden if you want to enjoy it more during the coming months of sun, light and good weather.
- Take your time
The first piece of advice we will give you to design your garden in a short time and with very good and clear results is the advice that all experts will give you: Do not touch a blade of grass without an idea and a plan for your future garden.
A gardening project will help you with: the time you will spend planning
- Browse every square meter of available space, taking into account the details of the terrain, the distance between each part of your home, vulnerable areas, etc.
- You need to observe the terrain at different times of the day to see how sunlight affects space.
- You need to think about the necessary practical aspects such as the budget you need not only to design and create the garden, but also to maintain it properly, what you want to plant and what you don't want, and what tools or machines you will need to work comfortably and get the best results in a short time (lawn mowers, hedge trimmers, trimmers, leaf blowers and vacuum cleaners, etc.)
- Write down the answers to the main questions on paper.
Our first piece of advice was to take your time to visualize your future garden. Our second piece of advice was to write down the answers to the following key questions that undoubtedly arose during that period of reflection: These questions are:
Why do we want to use the garden?
Before starting to design a garden, you need to think about how you will use the space. Perhaps you want a small garden to grow some aromatic herbs, rose hedges, or geraniums, or perhaps you want to tackle a more complex project and design an outdoor space with areas for dining, playing, and planting...
Who will take care of my garden?
Surely you have seen many pictures of gardens filled with flowers, ornamental plants, aromatic herbs, wonderful Zen ponds, gazebos, terraces, playgrounds, and swimming pools... We would all like to enjoy private landscapes like these, but the main question we should ask ourselves is what to do when you see those wonderful little or large gardens in magazines? Who cares about maintenance?
If you're going to do it yourself, assess the time you'll need to ensure every corner of your garden is in magazine-perfect condition in any season. If you're working from sunrise to sunset, you might need to consider a minimalist garden design, planting hardy, almost self-sufficient plants, converting a gazebo into a compact barbecue, reducing the space allocated to areas that require more time for maintenance, and so on.
How much will my garden cost?
A fairly common mistake is that many people who design their own garden only include in their budget the necessary to get started: machinery that only needs to be paid for once, fencing or enclosure, irrigation system, tool shed, etc., but they do not include maintenance expenses in their calculations.
There are many factors that affect the cost of garden maintenance, but one is particularly important: the type of vegetation you choose to include. Every plant, tree, shrub, flower, herb, and so on has specific needs in terms of soil type, water quantity and quality, and fertilizer. Some plants require virtually no budget, while others might be more demanding. We're sorry you're planting, so... do the math and answer the million-dollar question: "How much will my garden cost now... and tomorrow?"
- Take advantage of new technologies
Today we have a huge advantage: we can find software to design practically anything, for example: a home garden with a professional look, for instance:
Marshall Garden Imaginer . An interesting 3D tool with the tremendous advantage of displaying realistic images of future gardens.
Puzzle Garden: A simple program that allows you to design the basic part of your garden in a few minutes.
These are just two examples. In future articles, we'll tell you more about programs and mobile applications that can help you design all kinds of gardens, especially small ones. However, if you prefer to design your future garden with pencil and paper, go for it! The project will be a little more challenging, but it will certainly be just as effective.