Freshen-Up Your Front Yard

Do you love gardening but lack space for a backyard garden? Or would you like to add more pizzazz to your front yard? A front-yard garden can give you a place to enjoy your hobby and improve your curb appeal too.

A front yard can be an optimal spot for a vegetable or flower garden, especially if it receives ample sunlight. “We put gardens in front yards all the time,” says Carly Mercer, the director of garden programming at Love & Carrots, a company that designs, installs, and maintains urban gardens in Washington, DC. “Especially in the city. It’s where there is the most sun.” Before you plant, make sure local ordinances allow a front-yard garden, she suggests.

You can dig a garden plot in your yard or add raised garden beds instead. With raised beds, you only need to add bagged soil to begin planting. If you start your garden this month, choose warm-weather vegetables, such as cucumber and squash. You can start with seeds for quick-growing vegetables, such as beans, but for tomatoes and other slower-growing crops, it’s best to buy seedlings instead. A local nursey can suggest annual or perennial flowers for your garden if you want blooms.

You’d be surprised at how much you can reap from a front-yard garden. Wellness lifestyle advocate and author, Shawna Coronado, says that in one year, she was able to donate more than one hundred pounds of food grown in her 200-square-foot front yard to a local food pantry. Even if you don’t have much yard space, you could grow produce by planting tomatoes in five-pound buckets or herbs in a small planter on your front porch.

A garden can add beautiful color to your front yard. For instance, Coronado says bull’s blood beets, which have deep burgundy leaves, look fantastic in gardens. “I don’t plant it for the beet,” she says. “I grow it for the greenery, and beet greens are edible.” When she pairs those beets with a certain kind of kale, the visual effect is amazing. “Lacinato kale is an Italian variety and is super blue,” she explains. “If you plant that kale next to those beets, you have an awesome blue and burgundy combination that looks great together.”