The Secret to a Breathtaking Food Garden (5 Design Tips for ANY Budget)

Do you sometimes get that frustrating feeling that your garden just isn't quite looking as nice as you'd hoped? You're pouring all this effort into building and maintaining it and you just don't know why it's not looking like those Pinterest images or the YouTube videos that inspired you in the first place. I've certainly felt this way over my years of gardening and so in this video I'm going to talk about five design tips that I'm using to make my garden look more beautiful that you can use too. Some of these tips are low cost or free and some cost money so regardless of your budget there's going to be something in here for you. Tip one is to consider verticality or height in your garden and I think this is one that's easily overlooked for beginner gardeners but something that can really add huge visual impact when it's carefully considered. When you're laying out your garden or you're planning out your annual crops for the season it's easy to only think about things from a bird's eye view and forget about what the garden is going to look like in three dimensions and the trouble with that is that it's that third dimension height where the experience of the garden really comes into play. Think about it if you want to create a garden room or guide views in a particular direction or create a focal point you're going to use height to achieve this. Other than physical walls or fences there are three main ways to introduce more height into your food garden. Trees, trellises and hedges. Now these are all very common elements and you're probably going to want to include at least two of these in your garden so then it just becomes about how to position them to achieve a particular goal. Here's an example. This spring I installed these arched trellises over the main pathway in my garden with a few goals in mind. I wanted to expand my growing area by growing crops over the path. I wanted to frame this long view through the garden with lush green foliage and I wanted to add a visual focal point from particular angles. Now as with all things not everything goes exactly as planned and due to various reasons these crops that I've planted to grow up the trellises are not as far along as I would have hoped but hopefully by the end of summer they'll be covered in green. This is a very simple easy and often low maintenance way to add beauty to your garden. There are so many different flowering plants out there that you're bound to be able to find something that suits your climate and context. I initially didn't have many flowers in my garden because I was really focused on the productive plants but over the past few years I've started to figure out what does well in my context. What I've figured out so far is that cosmos, zinnias, echinacea, marigolds, salvias and lavender all do quite well and they can handle the stinking hot windy days that we get here. If you want to grow more flowers here are my recommendations. Use flowers on the borders of beds or interspersed amongst veg to add diversity and visual interest. I've lined this main path with flowers and the goal is to have flowers then arch, flowers then arch and I've got a few gaps because not everything's done quite so well but you get the idea. Pick a few species to begin with, keep what does well and get rid of the difficult ones. Then try a few new ones each year to make it cost effective. You can buy a few seedlings which are sometimes a bit expensive but then you can propagate them from either cuttings or seeds or you can start them from seeds yourself. Who doesn't love a water feature? It's one of those elements that's been missing in my garden up until just a few weeks ago because I've just finished installing this pond and whilst the build didn't go exactly to plan as things never do, I'm really happy with how it's turned out. It holds about 2,500 litres of water which is captured from my driveway and my roof which I can use to water my garden in the dry times. In the meantime it serves as a beautiful focal point that we can look at from our outdoor seating area just up there. And look there's so much that I could say about this pond it's already serving as a resource for wildlife and I documented the whole build so I have plans to make a video about it so just let me know in the comments what you want to know. If you want to install a water feature in your garden you can probably find something suitable for your garden size and budget. It could be as simple as a bird bath or a small fountain or it could be a small pond like this one here. If you've got the space and money and it fits with your property design you could install a natural swimming pool or a dam which can be a fantastic long-term investment. To give you an idea of how much this pond cost it was about a thousand dollars in total and that includes the plumbing the liner and the plants. The rocks and the pebbles I was actually able to source completely for free. This is quite a simple and obvious tip but it can make a big difference to how your garden looks and feels. Now full disclaimer I'm by no means perfect at this but there are a few things that I've been doing recently to make the garden look less cluttered and I've got a few recommendations. Firstly every tool or piece of equipment needs a home. I hang all of my tools on my tank which is pretty rustic but the reason why I've done this is because this position is really close to the garden so I'm much more likely to put my tools back here after I use them and they're also super easy to access. I don't have a great spot to put a garden shed and this is of course another great option which protects your tools too but either way I'd highly recommend keeping your tools as close as possible to where you use them most. Second is to bury your irrigation pipes and hide any drip tube under mulch. This winter I buried the main irrigation pipes that run down either side of this path and that small move has made such a difference to how this pathway looks. The third thing I've done in my garden is to install some permanent fencing and screen my compost area. Originally I had temporary black fencing here which looked pretty ordinary and now I've made a fence of star pickets and galvanized steel mesh which acts as a trellis for a grapevine. You can see this grape is still getting established so it hasn't covered the whole fence yet and so in the meantime and in winter I've got a piece of shade cloth that sits behind the fence which visually screens the compost area really well. Now if I was going to do this again I think what I'd actually do to make this even better would be to paint that steel mesh black. So I might actually dismantle the fence this winter and paint it but let me know whether you think I do that in the comments. Hardscaping can easily be one of the more expensive parts of any garden project especially if you're paying for the installation but if you're willing to make the investment it's one of the best ways to take your garden from pretty nice to something really special. Now what I mean by hardscaping is all of the non-living structural elements of your garden such as raised beds, paving, edging, steps, retaining walls, pergolas and garden walls. Probably the most common elements that can add a lot of value to most gardens are paving and edging. So let's talk a little bit more about those. Firstly, materials. Pick a simple material palette that you can use consistently throughout the whole garden. This will make the garden feel a lot more cohesive and if you're going to do paving or edging do it well. Don't buy cheap plastic edging that you're just going to throw out in a year. For edging I'd recommend timber, stone, brick or steel and for paving I'd recommend brick, stone, granitic sand or gravel. If cost is a constraint, which let's face it it is for most of us, source yourself some nice recycled materials as they're often cheaper and they're actually more sustainable too. Here's a simple edging project that Maddie and I finished a month ago that we did with Reclaimed Bricks that we actually got for free from her parents. So this didn't cost us anything but it made this area look a lot nicer and made the layout feel a lot more intentional. So I hope you found those tips helpful and if you'd like to learn more about how to design a functional, abundant and beautiful garden for yourself I've got a workbook that will take you through a step-by-step process that you can download completely for free. It's been very humbling actually to see that over seven and a half thousand people around the world are using this workbook already and if you'd like to work with me personally on your garden I'll leave a link in the description below for that too. Otherwise, thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one!