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This is a very early draft, lots more details to come

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Lots of zones and structure help make a smallish garden feel bigger and more interesting

All too often the people who write gardening books and have YouTube channels have big gardens, people who write books about small gardens, just fill them with beautiful pictures of small gardens that they’ve had no involvement with, it’s frustrating.

A lawn is an essential play space for us

I don’t have a big garden by most peoples criteria but I do have a big veg garden on total, so I count myself in that fortunate group. I’ve tried though, to provide some helpful advice for small space gardeners because although I have a large allotment, my wife has a small plot and we also have a very small front garden - which we manage as a potager - and a smallish back garden, which we manage as a kitchen garden.

We try to manage the plots, the potager and kitchen garden as if they are our only gardens. It’s drawing from that experience that has helped me to write this chapter, which is far from complete!

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I know for some people my small gardens would be considered big, but I only write about my own experiences. If you have a smaller garden search for content on square foot gardening, microgreens or container gardening.

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Growing a little of everything in each garden is part of my strategy to ‘abundance through diversity’, it makes life more interesting and it reduces the risk of losing a whole crop to disease or pests.

There are so many ways to garden though and I can’t hope to describe them all in this chapter, so I’m going to focus on describing how I went about designing and planting my smallish gardens, starting with the kitchen garden.

Context is everything though, so first let me explore the benefits, objectives and constraints that I’m working with in these gardens, lets start with the constraints:

1. Safety: most important is that the gardens are safe for children to play in, my kids are all adults now, but the garden has to be a great playground for the grandkids and other visiting children
2. Beauty: all of our living spaces overlook the gardens, so they need to be attractive to look at, all through the year and during the day and night
3. Easy and simple: I only have about 10 hours available each week for gardening and most of that is directed at the allotments, which are our primary growing spaces. When I’m at home I don’t want to feel that the kitchen garden is an additional burden, so it needs to be very quick and easy to look after. One hour a week is all that it needs and that includes looking after the lawn and patios.
4. Shady: like most small home gardens I’m working with a lot of shade, but that shade also means shelter and warmth at some times of the year
5. Lazy: the garden does triple duty, it needs to be a play space, a relaxing entertainment space and a easy to manage growing space, summing up, I want to feel lazy when I’m at home
6. Zero cost: everything in the gardens, including the buildings, greenhouse etc has been paid for by savings from our food bill over the years, mostly grown on my allotment. My hobbies need to be zero cost overall. It’s amazing how it adds up, when you’re lucky enough to have a big family to feed.

A greenhouse is a wonderful addition to a small garden

So given these constraints these are the objectives that I came up with:

1. Low maintenance: the garden really needed to be low maintenance, so most of the paths are stone, the patios are stone, the beds are raised and have wooden sides, the lawn is easy to cut in 4 minutes (with a manual push mower) and has edges that I can strim up to in about 1 minute. The paths that aren’t stone are thickly mulched with wood chip.
2. Zoned: The garden has clearly defined zones, there’s the morning patio and play patio, this is patio gets the morning and early afternoon sun, it’s used primarily for trampoline play, playing games. It’s clear of plants, except for the edges where we take advantage of the brick walls to grow heat loving annuals: tomatoes, peppers. At the other end of the garden we have the evening patio, this gets the afternoon and evening sun, it’s dedicated to seating and shaded with a permanent umbrella, up against the brick walls we have more space for heat loving plants in containers. Along both sides of the lawn and at the bottom of the garden we have our primary growing spaces, these combine raised beds, with vertical growing along the edges.