How to Start a Small Garden That Will Thrive

Starting a garden can seem really intimidating, especially if you’re a newbie (like me) and you don’t have a whole lot of space (also like me). I live in a small townhome with a teeny tiny backyard, but I wanted to have a garden for my daughter and me to learn and explore in. So, we built ourselves a small vegetable garden! Sure, there were some ups and downs the first year, but that is to be expected! Overall, it was so much fun building it with her and watching our plants grow!

The real reason we started this garden was because of the pandemic! We kind of got tossed into it. During the last part of the in-person school phase in the 2019/2020 school year, my daughter’s Primary class started growing some seeds. With all of the teachers and students gone, someone needed to take care of the plants. My mom (who was a teacher in that class) took the planters home to take care of the little seedlings. Then, she needed to travel for a long period of time, so Olivia and I kind of got “stuck” with them. Let me just tell you, I don’t have a green thumb, so I really didn’t think anything was going to survive. But much of our tiny baby carrots, bell peppers, and tomatoes DID survive, and much to my surprise, they thrived.

We ended up with these three planters full of seedlings that really needed to be put into the ground. Olivia and I decided we were going to go ahead and plant them so we dug up some space in our yard. I did most of the digging and weeding, and she did most of the exploring and searching for bugs and worms. Have I mentioned she’s a bug-loving girl?

This is where our small garden began!

I know sometimes with small outdoor spaces you don’t really have much of a choice on where your little garden can go. If you do have a little wiggle room, this is what I kept in mind when choosing where my garden would be…

How much sun does the area get? The spot we chose (not that we had too much of a choice with our tiny yard) is close to the house and will get half sun and half shade as the house shades the garden for about half of the day.
Another consideration was that my yard already had a small patch of grass missing so we just extended that area and pulled up the grass and weeds there.

Nothing Fancy

When we first dug out our garden space to move our started plants we didn’t do anything fancy and that’s perfectly okay! Started is absolutely better than perfect, and we really wanted to give the plants more room to grow. We made two rows and put carrots in one row and tomatoes & peppers in the other row. I still used the planters to keep more plants in as a border for the garden since I didn’t put one in yet, and I wanted to keep the dog out of the garden! (We were dog sitting my parents’ dog at the time too!) We used soil from Lowe’s to build up the area a little bit and to make sure the plants were getting some good dirt to start them off. Our space turned out to be about 4ft by 6ft total.

A few weeks later we finished the garden by adding wood to go around the perimeter of the garden space. Olivia and I added big shells that we had previously collected at a Shackleford Banks trip. We worked really hard to carry these shells 3 miles down the beach so we want to admire them daily! We also pulled our carrots (and made carrot cake) and planted a couple more peppers & tomatoes in the empty space.

Make Sure Your Small Garden Thrives

Compatibility

Grow UP, not OUT

In our first planting season, we didn’t do any vining plants but now I have SO MANY! The key to having more plants is to put up trellises and ways for the vines to go UP. Don’t let one plant take over the other plants in the garden. Make sure the plants that are going up don’t put too much shade on the smaller plants. Everyone needs sun.

Small gardens need water too

As with any garden, make sure you’re watering. I made a little rule for myself to water at 7 am & 7 pm. This is so it’s not too hot at either time when I’m watering. I didn’t know this but the leaves will burn if you’re watering while the sun is on them. So I water early in the morning and then after the sun is a bit lower.

Bugs!!

Just because it’s small doesn’t mean there aren’t bugs! Don’t forget to watch for the insects so you can prevent them. They’ll kill your small garden quicker than you think! We found a lot of hornworms on our tomato plant this year. We picked some off and we kept some in a butterfly net (more on that later!)

How it ended up

Overall, we had a GREAT first growing season, even if it was a little impromptu and driven by the pandemic a bit. I’m so glad those seedlings were placed into our laps because I’ve grown to really love my small garden and LOVE watching it grow. In the end, we harvested carrots, green bell peppers, and a TON of cherry tomatoes, more than we even knew what to do with! If you have or want to start a small garden, tell us about it in the comments! What is your favorite thing to grow in it? What do you wish you could grow?