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Amazing Ideas for Creating an Adorable Backyard



Your backyard is a space that can help provide you with solace, give you a connection to nature and even subsidize your grocery bill by providing healthy, organic produce. The following will explore a few wonderful ideas you might want to employ when working in your backyard. The emphasis will be on things that contribute to things that feel cottage, cozy, adorable, and charming.


For Whimsy And Wonder Skip Straight Lines

Nature very rarely creates perfectly straight lines, and because of this, we tend to feel rigid in environments full of them. To amp up the cozy cottage feeling of your garden, try to avoid putting too much straightness into your design. This means if you’re going to have a path from the house to your garden furniture, you might want to make it winding rather than angular. This means you might want to let the natural roundness of plants dictate your flower bed shapes rather than fitting plants into strict squares. This approach also helps ensure that maintenance isn’t too much of a headache. If everything is perfectly straight, it becomes super obvious when a hedge hasn’t been trimmed. If you let things take a more organic, natural form, no one is going to notice if you get behind on your garden work.


Deal With Drainage First

Before you get thrilled by lavender plants or the perfect climbing vine, you want to consider the drainage situation in your backyard. If there are patches where the grass is dry and yellow or patches where puddles tend to gather after rain, you don’t have adequate drainage. Poor drainage can make growing plants a nightmare and damage the foundation of your home. Take steps to ensure you have decent drainage before you begin any aesthetic work, as you might later discover you need to dig everything back up in order to deal with what’s going on beneath the soil. This effort will also help ensure that managing your yard requires a lot less maintenance and less water (if you do a good job with drainage, you might not need to water your garden at all).


Start With The Big Elements

Big elements in your backyard are gazebos, trees, and hardscape sitting areas. Take the time to place these items where you want them and take note of any changes that they make to the available shade. These larger items will also be able to offer support to things like climbing vines and floppy flowers, giving you more plant options. If you don’t have a lot of space for larger elements, consider a single wooden curved garden bench or window boxes. Smaller details like this can give your space a sense of charm without taking up too much space. You also want to be wary of planting trees too close to the house as the roots can damage your foundation, and the branches can damage the roof during extreme weather events like storms.




Consider Water Features

Water is a magical substance. Just being near it calms us by soothing our heartbeats and helping us reduce stress. This effect is increased when the water is moving. Consider a pond or bird bath; you might even be able to find some beautiful aquatic plants like lilypads to add extra charm to the space. If you have the space for it, a water fountain can add a ton of soothing beauty to your space.


Call In Wildlife

Part of a charming space involves the natural wildlife that lives there. Selecting flowers that call to butterflies and hummingbirds and choosing features that draw songbirds to your space can help create a magical fantasy feeling that is super adorable. When installing any bird feeding features, be sure to do your research about the proper maintenance steps required. Sometimes unclean bird features can actually cause harm to birds; this is especially common when it comes to hummingbird feeders. You can also choose bird seed that attracts particular kinds of birds.


Compost

Developing a compost system in your home can save you a ton of money when it comes to fertilizer and leave you with a yard that is luscious and thriving (what’s cuter than a full garden in bloom?). All food has nutrients in it, even the scraps that you throw out because they don’t taste-wise or texturally suit your meal. Rather than leaving them in a plastic bag in a landfill where the nutrients can’t feed more life, why not bury compost in your garden? Things like egg shells, coffee grounds, fruit scraps, and vegetable scraps can all help feed your garden at no extra cost. Plants need nutrients just like humans do, and if you’re growing to produce, this is even more important. Vegetables that grow in nutrient-dense environments have higher nutrition levels. Vegetables that grow in an area where monocropping has taken place for years (one plant filling an entire field) are often lacking vital nutrients as a result of the soil being completely depleted of what it is that plants need.


Focus On Perennial Plants

One of the best ways to increase the charm of your space without adding a ton of extra work is to select perennial plants. These are plants that come back every year, so they don’t need to be replanted every season. Because they grow for years, they can often develop highly-advanced root systems which can help them thrive in dryer years and colder years. You also want to emphasize what are called dynamic accumulators; these are plants that dig really deep into the soil to get nutrients that a lot of other plants can’t reach. When their nutrient-packed leaves die off in the winter and are left to sit on top of the soil and degrade, all those nutrients are now available for plants that can’t reach so deep into the soil.

The above information should have given you a few ideas for how you can create an adorable, abundant garden. It’s okay if this process takes some time; you usually won’t know exactly when your work is done until you’ve seen your backyard throughout all four seasons. Things change from season to season, leaving you with an understanding of gaps in your garden, like plants that are still colorful in November or something that blooms early so that the beginning of spring is lovely in your yard.