A veggie garden is a great idea but you want it to look gorgeous too: here’s how
Growing your own vegetables makes perfect sense, especially right now. Celebrity gardener Charlie Albone reveals a plan to grow great veggies that taste (and also look) great.
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Charlie Albone unearths the secrets for beautiful beds where your vegetables will thrive
GROWING vegetables in the garden is something that is high on a lot of gardeners’ wish lists, but more often than not the vege patch doesn’t match up to the standard of the rest of the garden.
To have a good looking plot it needs to be healthy and for that you’ll need to follow a few rules.
Start by putting your vege patch in the right spot where it will receive a minimum of six hours of sunlight a day – if your plants don’t get this they won’t grow to their full potential and an unhealthy looking plot is a shabby looking one.
Raise your beds up to give them good drainage and to impose style.
This may be a crisp render finish, a modern timber batten or a rustic railway sleeper, but be warned metal will heat up and can burn your roots so stick with materials that insulate such as timber or masonry.
Plan your patch to get a structured or rustic look – whatever suits your style.
Laying out your plants in rows helps to give a more pristine, manicured look but you’ll create more microclimates and therefore widen the variety of plants you can grow with a mixture of layered planting – so decide what’s more important to you.
Go up for impact by introducing something for plants to climb on. Tripods or climbing frames in the centre of your garden bed will add a vertical accent and be practical for plants such as climbing beans.
Not all your plants need to be edible, companion plants such as marigolds or nasturtiums actually help to keep your veggies healthier by attracting pests to them over your harvest. The plants are also great as they add a splash of flower colour.
Your garden doesn’t have to look like a vegetable patch, you can plan a normal looking garden and use edible plants such as Rosemary to form clipped hedges, Bay trees to give you rounded ball shapes and then introduce softness through feathery foliage from fennel or even carrots – have a bit of fun with it.
Charlie Albone is the co-host of Selling Houses Australia and director behind Inspired Exteriors.