How to Ensure Your Garden Is An Aesthetic Improvement To Your Property

We know, keeping up with a vegetable garden can be hard, and sometimes, despite everyone’s best intentions, they can become an eyesore.

We’ve all driven by our neighbor’s garden in September, waist-high with weeds and looking more like a jungle than a garden.

It’s no wonder that most people hide their gardens behind the house like a messy secret!

But it truly doesn’t have to be that way.

Here are our Top 3 Tips for making sure that your garden will actually be BEAUTIFUL – all season long!

#1.  Proper Design: Both your garden’s location, orientation and the elements that go into it must be clearly planned for and visualized before the season starts.  

Think about:

• Full sun: veggies are sun worshippers!
• Clear Layout & Defined Edges: Gravel pathways and raised beds make clean lines and enable easier upkeep.
• Re-blooming flowers in the right places will add color and habitat for pollinators – plus they benefit your veggies!
• Succession planting ensures that there is always something green and thriving in your garden – and that old crops are immediately removed from eye-site.

Nothing ruins the vibe more than crispy, dead old plants hanging around like party guests who won’t leave.

Plan it well, and your garden becomes a feature.

#2. Weekly Maintenance: Annual vegetable and flower gardens are totally different from landscape gardens and perennials – they grow insanely fast and require more upkeep!  

The following garden tasks are not negotiable, and are key to making sure that your garden thrives – and stays beautiful.  

• Pruning – Tomatoes can grow a foot a week in early summer – they wait for nobody!  Consistent pruning will keep plants in check and prevent a jungle situation that might cause your neighbor to raise an eyebrow!
• Thinning – Allows for better air flow and fattening up of crops.  Doing this on-time is key!
• Weeding – Weeds can grow 6 inches in one week in spring!  Tackling them consistently and early will save you a ton of work later down the road…and often means the difference between joy & garden burn-out.
• Pest and disease management – It’s so much easier (and less gross) to prune off 5 aphids, rather than 30,000.  Pests and disease can get out of control in very little time.  Weekly scouting and management helps prevent very disgusting situations.

#3.  Weekly harvesting:  want plants that produce more and look good?

Harvest often.  Sometimes twice per week.

When crops go to seed:

• Eating quality goes down: read – bitter, tougher, chewier
• Production of seed sends a signal to the plant to stop producing more fruit/flowers/vegetables.  
• Things start getting scraggly…

Weekly harvesting keeps plants productive, healthy, and visually tidy.

Plus, you get fresh food – which is kind of the point!

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A beautiful garden isn’t about perfection.

It’s about planning, consistency, and not letting zucchini take over your life.

Keep it tended. Keep it harvested.

And let your garden be the best-looking thing on your property — not the neighborhood cautionary tale.

It can be tough to do it alone – let us know how we can support you!  Email us at info@homefrontfarmer.com – we are here to help!