Create a beautiful garden when you are renting

If you rent and are a garden lover, it can be difficult to have a large garden. You don’t want to spend a lot of money, since it’s not your house and you may have to move. It can be tricky, if you do nothing because you feel like you’ll only be there for a year, five years later you’ll wish you had made some improvements. On the other hand, you can develop a fantastic garden and then suddenly, after just 18 months, you get the eviction notice. It can be devastating. You have invested a lot of love, time, money and now you have to go. Real estate agents love it when you say I’ll garden and I’m sure I got a house in South Melbourne because I said that. My mantra is not to spend too much money because I don’t own the property. Another problem is that if you have lived in the same house for many years, you start to feel that it is yours, when in fact it is not. Moving can be heartbreaking, especially when you leave a few friendly plants behind.

First, you need to choose a property that has the right amount of sunlight for what you want to grow. You need to identify where north/south/east/west is and it is very important to know where the shadows fall and the position of the sun in winter. What may be a sunny front yard in the summer can be a very shady front yard in the winter. It’s a good idea to get approval from the owners before making too many changes. A house I rented, I didn’t bother to ask if it was okay to break up the paving and make garden beds. They may not want you to create a beautiful garden because once you move in, they may not want to take care of it. It’s heartbreaking to walk past and see all your hard work, falling apart.

Creating a large garden on a rented property is easier if the property is small, as this means you don’t need to do as much work. If it is a large rental property, you may decide to develop only one area. Another idea is to talk to the owner and get him to agree that if you do the work, he will pay for the plants and whatever else is needed. I often think homeowners don’t understand that if you develop a nice yard it will increase the value of their home and that means money in their pocket.

I have only one rule when it comes to creating a garden in a rental property and that is don’t buy expensive plants. So I only buy tubes (3 inch pots) or 6 inch pots. This limits me to spending a lot of money on something that I can’t take when I move. I also imagine that anything in a tube will become a bigger plant over time. Also smaller plants overcome the shock of transplanting and begin to grow faster than large potted plants.

An inexpensive way to create a garden is to take cuttings from good old-fashioned plants like geraniums, lavender, sage, daisies, and hydrangeas. These plants attack very easily, do not need much care and grow very fast. You will have a great garden within 12 months. Slower plants, such as roses, camellias, and deciduous trees, take several years to be ready to plant in the garden.

If you are renting, you may think that you cannot have a vegetable garden. Well, that’s not true. Today, you can grow many vegetables in pots and there are now a wide variety of different containers for growing vegetables. You can use old wheelbarrows, old cut up tanks, old wooden crates, and you can even buy wooden crates from some vegetable growers. The same rules apply, good quality soil enriched with compost and animal manure, well drained and full sun.

It’s heartbreaking when you have to leave some of your special plants behind. One way to get around this problem was to plant some of my favorite potted plants. I have an incredible variety of pots in my garden, from the largest to the smallest. I even use some of them to fill in the gaps in my garden, which is one way I change things up when I feel like the garden looks tried and true and I’m sick of the same old look. It’s true that moving is a pain, because I have so many, but this helps me immediately establish a new garden when I move and makes me feel more stable.

Another trick is when you find out you are moving, is to run around the garden too much and take cuttings. It’s really the last thing you want to do while in this area, but you’ll regret it if you don’t. I have two unusual shade tolerant sages and I didn’t want to lose them. So, I took cuttings from sage miniata it has glossy green leaves and traffic light red flowers. To take cuttings, you should use a good quality propagation potting mix, not ordinary potting mix because it is not designed to drain the cuttings. So there’s a trace of this red sage in every house I’ve lived in for the last 10 years.

I have also been known to dig up plants when I found out I was moving. This is what I did with my other shade-loving plant: sage forskaohlie. It has beautiful blue flowers with white dots in the throat of the flower and is self-sowing. This is an excellent idea, especially if you are moving in the winter, as taking cuttings is not always possible. Clean out some old pots, get a good quality potting mix, and dig up. The only downside to this is that when you’ve moved and have a million other things to do, taking care of your plants, especially in the height of summer, can be difficult.

There is a wide variety of plastic, terracotta and concrete pots to choose from. You can also use old wooden boxes, old (clean) oil cans and the good old wine barrel. I have a lavender that grows in an old oil that a friend found for me. It goes very well weapons. The only drawback of the pots, whatever they are, is that the big ones are heavy. If you move regularly, it may be a good idea to buy a cart. They eliminate the backbreaking work of moving heavy pots. They are available now.

When you are physically moving your plants, it is a good idea to ask a friend for help, because lifting pots, especially large ones, is very heavy and hard work. Last time I moved I rented a trailer, best thing I’ve ever done. My friends and I loaded up and moved everything in one go, instead of many short trips in my car. I watered them well first, then when we got to the new house I put them in a shady spot until I figured out where the hot spots were and was ready to lay out the garden.

So that you can have a nice garden if you are renting, it just takes a little thought and organization. Growing plants in pots gives you many opportunities that you don’t have if you’re renting and don’t want to plant in the garden. Growing plants in pots also allows you to change things up and keep your garden interesting.