The Downsized Veggie Garden. Kate Copsey
the center of a patio table where your guests can snip a few leaves to put into their sandwich right where they are eating! Likewise, window boxes look lovely on the deck railings when filled with flowering annuals, but if you slip in a colorful pepper or tomato, you create a mixed container that looks attractive as well as being productive.
Vegetables are plants too! Sometimes we get hung up on finding a perfect place for the vegetables and forget that they are just plants. A vegetable can be an annual, perennial or even a shrub. Just as an attractive ornamental shrub looks fine in the garden, so can an edible shrub such as blueberries. An integrated landscape mixes up all the garden plants, both vegetables and ornamentals: lettuce in the rose garden, tomatoes along the fence line in front of clematis and a row of blue kale used as a border to the perennial bed. This integration is particularly important if you want to grow your vegetables in the front garden where curb appeal is expected. See how nice those colorful chives look on the page opposite.
Or, the area for your vegetables can be placed as a stand-alone raised bed. For an apartment or condo with a deck or hardscaped patio, you can design with interesting containers, as well as vertical treatments. Much more about containers below, but first let’s look at raised beds.
6 Great Vegetables for the Front Garden:
Our front gardens are on show to the world, so having attractive looking vegetables is important. Try these colorful vegetables in your sunny front yard garden.
Artichoke: This is a large back-of-the-border plant with great yellow flowers.
Red basils: Red or purple basils make great foliage plants at the start of the summer, and then the pink flowers turn it from foliage to a beautiful flowering annual.
Chards: No longer are chards basic green with white stems, they now come with bright red or yellow stems and make great middle-of-the-border plants.
Kales: Kales can be blue or green, large or small. Try the curly blue kales for a border in front of your perennial bed, or the large kale in front of an evergreen hedge.
Red pepper: Small, bright red jalapeno peppers brighten up the middle of any garden.
Okra: A common Southern annual that can be grown everywhere, the okra plants put out hibiscus-like flowers in white or red. They are one of the most attractive vegetables and grow to about 4 feet, so place at the back or middle of the garden bed.
Raised Beds
Raised beds are a perfect solution for many situations in the garden, like poor soil or hardscape that makes digging in the garden impossible. Raised beds can also be looked at as a temporary solution in rental properties, as you can disassemble them almost as easily as you can make them. One of the many advantages to a raised bed is the ease of maintenance. The loose, soilless mix is free of weeds and grass at the start, and any weeds that arrive are easy to remove. Most beds can be weeded in a matter of minutes.
Don’t get hung up on size! Although most plans for raised beds refer to a 4×4-foot square bed, it is not the only dimension you can use. Maybe your small area can’t accommodate a 4-foot width but is longer than 4 feet, such as along a wall or building. A 2×8-foot bed works just as well as a square one. The minimum dimension for one large vegetable plant – say, a tomato or cabbage – is a 1×1-foot square, so you’re free to think in terms of several squares all together – or you can slot the vegetables around the garden, using one square foot here and another one somewhere else. That one square foot is also big enough for many little mesclun and salad plants and almost a dozen onions, scallions and leeks.
Building a Raised Bed
Raised beds in a community garden.
Materials to Frame the Bed
The gardens are going to be outside, so consider weather resistance in the materials you select. You can buy complete raised bed kits, including the boards, corners and anchors all in one box. You will probably need a Phillips-head screwdriver to screw the corner pieces in and a mallet or hammer to drive the anchors into the ground. The downside to most commercial kits is the depth of bed – most are 6 inches deep, a minimum for healthy roots, but some kits are only 4 inches in depth, which is a little shallow for many vegetables.
Here are some things to know about the materials, whether you choose a kit or build your own bed from scratch:
■ Cedar: Cedar is a naturally long-lasting material that needs no added sprays to make it weatherproof – and it looks great in the garden, which is why most commonly available kits use cedar boards that will last for many seasons. Box store lumber departments and lumber merchants usually have cedar boards. The only decision to make when buying the lumber is how deep you want the bed. Standard boards come in 6, 8 or 10-inch widths and lumber departments have 8, 10 or 12-foot lengths. Most stores will cut the boards to 4 feet, which is a standard size for beds and fits easily into cars.
■ Redwood: Redwood has similar insect and moisture resistance as cedar and makes an excellent raised bed frame. The weathered redwood boards take on an attractive gray color that blends nicely into any landscape. Alas, redwood raised bed kits or boards are not always as easy to find as cedar.
■ Composite materials: These materials are similar to those used on decks. Composites are a blend of polymers and wood, giving a natural wood look and feel but with greater weather resistance. Kits made from composite material are found at many large stores, but you could have trouble finding boards to make your own beds.
Not all raised beds need wood – concrete blocks and bricks work well too.
■ Recycled plastic: Garden beds, edging and raised bed kits made from weather resistant recycled plastic are very common. Costs vary tremendously, though you do get lots of color options, from bright primary colors to more subtle cedar colors, redwood colors and browns. The materials are generally lightweight compared to cedar beds and are a great option for temporary beds.
■ Non-wood beds: There is no rule that a raised bed has to be made from wood-like boards – it can be constructed with breeze blocks, bricks and almost anything that can keep the soil inside from flowing out. Concrete blocks are economical to buy and very easy to assemble, and though not particularly attractive in the beginning, they are quite acceptable when filled with vegetables and flowers.
What size do you need? Raised beds can, of course, be of any size you like, but most commercial kits are for 4×4-foot beds. These can be placed one on top of the other to make deeper beds or extended to make an 8×4-foot bed. Depths vary from 4-6 inches in the smaller sets to a full 8 inches in larger sets. For the first year, a simple 4×4 is probably a good way to go. Buying the lumber and getting it cut to size is often cheaper than buying sets, unless you get last year’s kit on sale in late winter. If you opt for building the garden yourself, you can pick the depth that suits you. For root vegetables such as carrots and potatoes, 10 inches is the minimum depth for successful growth.
■ Width: A 4-foot width is the most common bed size because most people can reach about 2 feet inside a bed, so from either side, anything within that 4-foot bed can be tended to. The material