Guide To Creating and Maintaining A Shade Garden

Having a sun-exposed backyard is a great thing for your plants, but can’t work as a chill-out spot without a proper shade. This tends to work in contradiction, so it usually all boils down to choosing between growing veggies and fruits and maintaining a cool spot to unwind. Luckily, this obligation of making a choice can be worked around in a couple of ways. This article will guide you through creating a proper shade for your garden, floral life to opt for, as well as maintaining the garden itself.

Herb Life for Shade

If you’re making a shade garden, whether it’s because you’ve opted for it or had no say in the matter, you have to be aware that you can’t grow whatever comes to mind. Certain plants, however, can not only grow in limited sun exposure, but in fact prefer such conditions. Such plants not only add nutrition and flavor to your meals, but in fact tend to look great in your garden. Before you is a list of herbs that need no more than 4 hours of sun per day:

• Mint
• Oregano
• Shiso
• Parsley
• Wild ginger
• Anise hyssop
• Cilantro
• Marjoram
• Lemon balm
• Spicebush
• Sweet woodruff

If fiber is what you’re looking for, you might want to try the following:

• Spinach
• Swiss chard
• Mesclun greens
• Mustard greens
• Kale
• Asian greens (choy, tatsoi, etc.)

Maintenance

In order to grow a shade garden, beating roots should be of top priority. There are three popular ways of doing this:

• Plant in containers – pots, flower boxes and trays provide a solid barrier even for the strongest and disobedient of roots.
• Dig down into the soil and insert a bottomless plastic barrel, to direct the roots downwards.
• Install raised beds and fill each with 12 inches of quality soil. One thing to keep in mind here is to avoid doing it over the entire garden surface at once, but rather add raised beds gradually over extended periods of time. Regular watering, of course, goes without saying.

While shade gardens require an amount of effort to establish, the upkeep is done with a breeze, requiring a minimal amount of involvement. Weeds require a lot of sunlight, so that problem is kept at bay automatically. Even the fall leaves present no harm in a shade garden – in fact, if you leave them where they fall, they’ll supply natural mulch that enriches and regenerates the soil as they disintegrate.

Creating a Proper Shade

If you are willingly making a shade garden, out of choice, rather than due to lack of options, you’ll need to provide it with a proper shade. There are many shade solutions available, and further on are only a couple of ideas:

• Shade sails – a simple and a rather effective way to create shade, while keeping your backyard open, these are quite easy to install and are even more easily removable. When it comes to the amount of money to set aside for this type of shades, feel free to check waterproof shade sail prices online and see how cheap they tend to be.
• Trees – If you place the trees within your garden strategically, you can make sure your garden is enjoying a natural shade. Plus, the trees provide for a neat look for any open area.
• Umbrellas – If you’re looking for a quick and DIY method of creating a shade, you can use some of your old umbrellas to provide your garden with a temporary shade, until you get a proper option.

So there you have it, a couple of basic points of shade gardening. There is a ton more information available online on shade gardens, so don’t refrain from doing a bit of exploring on your own part.