Starting an Urban Garden That Thrives

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It’s a fact that not everyone who wants to start a garden is blessed with an ideal location. However, it’s also true that even in the concrete jungle, a garden can thrive. With a little bit of creativity, you can make an urban garden that lasts long in your urban jungle property. Here’s how.

Look for a Place in Your Property That Gets Decent Amounts of Sunlight

The amazing thing about urban gardens is the fact that these can be placed and started in any part of your property that is exposed to sunlight. Windows and blank walls outdoors are some good examples. Any indoor space that gets a good amount of sun each day is also a good place to start the urban garden.

Get Suitable Containers

Containers you can use for the urban garden can be obtained from a local garden supplies shop. But if you’re on a budget, you can recycle old crates, plastic bottles, and even wooden boxes instead.

Choose Vegetables and Fruits That Are Suitable for the Season

To guide you in choosing plants for the season, make sure to use a plant and transplant calendar. Peas and spinach should be grown in March, while carrots and cucumbers should be grown in September.

Another good piece of advice is practicing crop rotation. Crop rotation is a systematic approach to deciding on the crop to plant, its exact location in the garden, and the exact time to plant that certain crop. Doing so is a great way to manage soil fertility and prevent (or at least reduce) issues such as soil-borne diseases as well as soil-dwelling insects.

Choose a Substrate

Whether it’s eggplants, zucchini, or tomatoes, there are few limits to the things that can be achieved with your vegetable patch. But before vegetables and fruits are ready to grow, a soil base is needed. A soil base ensures the healthy growth of plants.

Usually, city soil isn’t suitable for gardening, since they can contain lots of sand or clay. Because of this, your best bet is to prepare the soil with substrate before you begin planting. A good substrate should give plants the nutrients it needs to grow healthy and strong. Multi-purpose soil is a common type of substrate, and this you can easily find at the nearest garden supplies shop.

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To improve substrate impact, make sure that compost is added to it. Remember that compost has lots of nutrients.

Water Management

When you begin a vegetable garden, it’s very important to exercise caution when watering it with water from the tap or water from your rain water tanks. Make sure to check the water requirements of each plant, and to group plants with similar water requirements together. Overwatering plants will cause soil nutrients to get washed out, and when this happens, the plant/s are left without sufficient food.

Create Privacy

This step applies if your garden is located outdoors and/or you want all the bad-looking spots covered up. To achieve privacy, there are a few things you can do.

Fence In

Although fencing is usually used to mark the boundaries of one’s property, fencing can also be used to create privacy. So hire a fencing company to replace the existing low fencing in your property with ones that go higher. If you already have high fencing, but it happens to be unsightly, you can repaint it or smother it with vines.

Raise a Roof

The creation of a seating area that isn’t overlooked by nearby properties can prove to be difficult in urban locations. The only way around this difficulty is to have a solid roofed structure built on a corner of your garden. The roof of the structure can be made of metal or vines.

Grow Your Own Evergreen Screen

If you have a large area, you can have a tree positioned away from the garden boundary. No need for a row of trees; a well-positioned tree should be more than enough to hide the neighbors’ viewpoint.

For a garden in a smaller area, you can have a row of trained or pleached trees, which have branches that become denser as time passes. You can also have single tall specimens placed there.

Some amazing trees that assure evergreen privacy are Magnolia grandiflora, Ligustrum lucidum, and Quercus ilex. As for pleaching deciduous plants which can hold their leaves for some time and have an amazing autumn color, choose Pyrus ‘Chanticleer’ and Acer platanoides ‘Globosum.’ The former features a conical crown, making it architecturally interesting. It also loses leaves last when winter comes.

Grow a Hedge or Living Wall

Hedges are not just a great screen, as they also help dampen sound. They can be very hard to maintain, though, especially when they grow so large. Enter the living wall. This is a fixed wall covered with vines or herbaceous plants grown in fixed pockets. Easy to maintain, yet equally effective.

Conclusion

Urban gardens, when well-built, bring nature right at your doorstep. So when building one (or when having one built for you by a professional), make sure to invest in the best garden essentials instead of cutting corners.

Article Written by Taylah Montez

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