Garden Designs

What will your Organic Garden Look Like?

There are many different organic garden designs, as gardeners down the ages will attest.

Everyone has a different idea of how a garden should look, and a lot of it depends on your cultural preferences, such as those living in small towns may find.

Your garden in those circumstances will be designed in a manner to fit in, and conform to the usual and common ideas in that area.

Historically, dooryards, or a kitchen garden close to the entrance of the house were built in geometric shapes, the beds each with paths beside them for the produce, herbs, salad vegetables and soup ingredients to be easily accessible to the cook.

There are many different vegetable garden layouts; find out which one appeals to you, and which will give your plants a fighting chance to get the right amount of sun.

Owners of large estates or acreage where there is no other design close by to contrast or compare it to will be freer to follow their whims, and make gardens that are startlingly different and unique.

The country you live in will play a part in your preferences too; old medieval towns have brick or stone walls, and a potager garden might be a perfect fit.

A prairie farmhouse surrounded by cornfields can be designed to fit into the landscape with an edible landscaping design.

Long gone are the days when a huge staff of gardeners took care of beds of annuals, shrubberies with topiary trees and a huge vegetable garden to feed a household of hundreds.

Highly skilled gardeners are no longer available in the work force, and the skills of pruning topiary, making espalier fruit trees with their constant need for tying in, pinching and pruning are no longer useful for people to learn, except for the seriously addicted hobby grower.

Now, gardens are designed to be beautiful, but with much less maintenance.

In some cases, this is by building raised beds , where the vegetables are raised intensively, using some variation of the Square Foot Gardening method.

Other times, it’s permanent garden beds surrounded by paved walkways to enable the garden to be used all year, even in mud season.

Recycling in the organic garden is a way to minimize your carbon footprint, and produce food. What's your favorite way to garden frugally?

Circular or spiral gardens are a novel way to design vegetable gardens.

The spiral is a much more organic form, and many people who have tried it believe this circular design is much closer to how nature would build a garden.

Permaculture design is a way of growing food plants, animals and trees in close harmony, each one contributing in some way to the benefit of other organisms, whether this is by compost produced from their waste, or nutrition for plants or fish arranged to drop directly from the bottom of a rabbit pen into the area where plants are growing or into a pond.

Designing a garden using Permaculture methods is precise, delicately balanced, and innovative.

Use some of these ideas to create your unique and sustainable organic garden design.