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.

I’m in that fortunate group. My wife and I both have allotment plots, but we also have a 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 potager and kitchen gardens as if they are the only gardens that we have and it’s drawing from that experience that has helped me to write this chapter.

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 small gardens.

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: 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

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 shops, morning and afternoon means, exercising. 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.
3. Fun: We’ve tried to make the garden fun: lots of paths for the kids to race around on foot/scooters etc, nooks and crannies to hide in, benches to turn into shops or kitchens, multiple levels for jumping, every path/patio if lined with edibles: peas, blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, grapes, peppers, tomatoes, apples, pears and cherries.
4. Weed free: the allotment is full of deep rooted perennial weeds, bind weed, ground elder and mares tail encroaching from neighbouring plots. Weed seeds blowing in from every direction and tree seeds dropping in their thousands. The garden is a different story, it’s kept virtually weed free as there’s less weed pressure from all directions. We still get plenty of grass seedlings and there are dandelions of course, but it’s a few minutes a week to keep it free of weeds, if we much with compost each year.
5. Vertical: in small places we need to maximise the growing area and to soften the edges of the garden and create structure. As a result there’s plenty of vertical growing happening around the walls of the garden (grapes and raspberries) along the side of the path (peas, beans and hanging baskets) and edging the patios (tomatoes and peppers).
6. Easy to water: I actually quite like watering, but I don’t like standing around while I fill a watering can form a tap. So I have three dip tanks, that are always full of rain or tap water, one for the drive, one for the potager and one for the kitchen garden. I can also set the sprinkler to water the lawn and all of the main beds in one go. Watering usually takes me 10 minutes a day in summer.
7. Year round: the garden needs to look good all year round and that helps motivate me to keep it productive all year round too
8. Simple: I find simplicity very calming, but also efficient. I don’t subscribe to complex planting plans and intermixing lots of different plants (with different lifecycles) in the same bed. Complex gardens can look beautiful, but approaches like square foot gardening end up being very complex to manage, especially with many successions. I prefer to use simple interplanting schemes and relay planting to achieve the same levels of productivity.
9. Beautiful: we spend a lot of time in the garden and looking at the garden from inside the house (especially at night) so it needs to look good. This is a challenge, given the amount of edibles we grow, but I find that simple interplants and growing multiple varieties in rows or other patterns, with different leaf colours for example ends up being very ornamental. Lighting after sunset makes a huge difference.