Am I crazy for thinking about making my front landscaping a vegetable garden? It is southern facing. Could I make a nice colorful vegetable garden for my front landscaping area and make it look nice or am I just crazy for thinking this way?
by RomanGoddess1208
34 Comments
I’m thinking about it, and I need a massive superstructure to keep out deer.
Definitely think about it you have hoa rules, if you have animals to contend with, and if you’re going to move in the next few years (may affect resale value)
Go for it, it’s important to be able to grow your own food. Though, if your house has a history of lead paint, you shouldn’t grow anything you’ll be eating within 50 ft of it as a general rule. If you’re worried about that you can look into remediation and raised beds.
My front yard is the only place I get enough sun to grow veggies, so it’s the first thing folks see when they walk up to my house. Go for it!!
Do it, do it! Yay! But lead paint is a genuine concern so do a soil test if possible. If your soil tests clean, you can follow its suggestions and just add compost, mulch, and whatever mineral the test recommends. No need for raised beds.
Not crazy at all! Mine is in my backyard because my front yard has no sun, thanks to 2 huge oak trees. But I have some neighbors who have gardens in their front yards and I LOVE to stop and look at all they are growing (whether flower or vegetable) when I’m out walking!
Absolutely do it
I’d do it. If you want it to look nice (since it’s front facing), go for raised beds. I’d plan tomatoes and peppers on the east side though, so they avoid that scorching western exposure. Eggplants and herbs would love the south side. You can grow rosemary like a shrub in Florida.
HOA would be the only thing stopping you. Everything else you can deal with (animals)
Mr front yard has sun…backyard is shade. We have our edible gardens in the front. I have tried to make it attractive so we have various raised beds as well as a plan of native plants supporting an avocado tree and blueberry bushes.
Herbs & edible flowers patch!
All my life i have dreamed of owning a house where I could sit in a rocking chair, on the front porch, and admire my garden while waving to my neighbors. Maybe sell a few veggies over the fence.
I thought about putting ours in the front last year (better sun & front yard gets less use by the kids). We are on a busy street though, & the idea of car exhaust & lots of noise while working made me go with the backyard. If your street is quieter I say go for it!
The 2 houses that we owned in the U.S. only got sun in their front yards. I moved from the U.S. to Portugal. I see front yard vegetable growing here.
You do need to look at zoning restrictions and HOA rules. Also, you may need to plant root vegetables near the street and more easily harvested ones near your house.
Do it! I live in a townhome with an HOA that’s not that active. I tore out the scrubs planted by the HOA and have grown basil, rosemary, peppers and sunflowers. It’s the area that gets the most sun.
Neighbors seem to like it because I can see them running their hands over the rosemary as they walk by.
People expressing concern about lead paint, how about a raised bed with nice architectural touches to match the house? It would look nice and possibly sidestep the lead issue.
Beware of other humans. Some not so nice people might think it’s there for the taking.
We put a lot of raised beds in our front yard a few years ago, and keep adding to them. It looks nice, and we get a lot more produce than we did when we only used the back yard. Now I can grow shade loving plants in back, and sun lovers up front!
Go for it! I’m a front yard vegetable gardener because that is where the sun is and the walnut trees arent. Vegetables and herbs are beautiful! I also have flowers mixed in throughout.
Fyi, people frequently say hello or stop for a brief chat when I’m out there. I enjoy that, but realize that not everyone would.
I have a strip of land on the left side of my driveway bordering my neighbors property, maybe 30’ long and 8-9’ wide. I turned the entire thing into my vegetable garden.
If you have neighbors that think it looks weird, just pretend they don’t exist. They’re irrelevant to your life anyway. I get a good amount of compliments from just about everyone when I’m outside, usually even the native garden beds that take up most of my front yard + the vegetables people can see.
If you care about cosmetics I’d put easy going plants more front a center. Pepper plants generally look really good if they’re watered, mine didn’t really look bad aside from some sun scald on some peppers in the heat of summer.
Tomatos can look a little wild, but if you make a trellis that sits at about a 50-60 degree angle and let them drape over it they honestly look nice, imo.
My situation is a few 6×4 metal raised beds and some stuff in ground, so for cucumbers I just bent a cattle panel and put it between them for 2-4 cucumber plants to climb on each side. I keep them trimmed to a central leader until they’re like 2/3 of the way towards the arch – then I let them go wild and the cucumbers hand down for easy picking.
I was using the space between the plants for basil, but I’ve since switched to using clover as a living mulch. I haven’t grown the basil amongst the clover yet, but I imagine it should be fine. My goal is to just always have roots in the ground even if it means I water it a bit more, and the clover looks awesome.
There’s a lot of ways to make it look nice, but you don’t HAVE to do so. One easy way if you’re going right in the ground is to add some big pots amongst it all and plant some annuals or something. I like marigolds cause the seeds are easy to collect and I can collect enough from one plant to last for probably a life time.
I’ll also throw random plants like peppers in any empty spots in my perennial beds that hasn’t been filled out yet, just to have something there. Go crazy, man. It’s your life, your house, have fun with it. You won’t do anything you can’t change your mind about later.
Not crazy at all! I converted half my front lawn to garden space in 2021.
https://preview.redd.it/90kiiggx7vwf1.jpeg?width=3072&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0b001d2cf93cfa9348119fd96cbd92e8844c58ce
That southern facing sun is a huge win for a vegetable garden. Definitely get a soil test done first to rule out any lead concerns, but if it’s clear, you’re golden. A well-maintained veggie patch with some colorful peppers or leafy greens can look even nicer than a boring lawn.
if you own the property or your landlord / HOA doesn’t care then just do it
https://preview.redd.it/qxex5faldvwf1.jpeg?width=4000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=fda76ff7c30f188216367c5697ca756dfca7c334
Here is my front yard garden (in June) because it gets more sun than my backyard.
Do it! We have a good sized garden in our front yard because our back yard has some water oaks and they shade the yard pretty decently. Be prepared to have a much better relationship with your neighbors; if they’re anything like mine, they’ll want to stop and talk to you way more often about what you’re growing! 💜
Go for it! Though I’d recommend soil testing, not just for lead but so your plants can thrive.
A lot of suburban housing just has “fill dirt” in the yard, which is basically just cheap soil that’s often hard to grow things in. In my area it’s typically some kind of clay soil, which means it gets super dry during droughts and just incredibly water logged during rainy times.
I actually lost a tomato plant in a container over “fill dirt” this year because of it! We had so much rain the ground was saturated, and so the planter wasn’t draining. My poor tomato plant’s roots couldn’t get enough oxygen. (Other plants with better drainage did just fine!)
I have mostly raised beds/containers, but I’m slowly trying to amend the clay soil by top coating with compost + planting daikon radish, asparagus, sunflowers, and other plants that help break up clay soil. YMMV on what’s a good fit for your area.
It’s also definitely worth including some native plants for local pollinators, even if they’re not edible. My cucumber plant this year was *covered* in bees, and I’m convinced the coneflowers and other native plants are a big part of it. (As a plus, the coneflowers are fine with clay soil.)
The sunniest spot in our whole yard is the little patch of grass right in front of our front door. I plonked a big raised bed down there a couple years ago and don’t regret it. I think lawns are kind of silly and wasteful anyway.
I think it’s a great idea! Since you’re in SW Florida, you’ll need to consider something like shade cloth in the summer. I’m making an assumption that you will get more hot days than I do in Central VA. When it gets really hot, vegetables actually need some partial shade. I had to put up shade cloth in July because we had some days when it was literally just over 100°, and that wasn’t the heat index due to humidity. Or you can have an early or late growing season since you mentioned you don’t get frost, and treat midsummer like our winter.
I’ve been thinking about putting in a vegetable garden in my front yard, but I could barely keep up with the one in the backyard this year. I was out there everyday and learned a lot about pests, and too much sun and heat! I didn’t realize you could have too much sun.
I’ve done it and it’ll be beautiful. Here are shots of my garden. I live in a zero lot community so front yard was my only option. Mixture of containers and raised beds. More not in this pic.
https://preview.redd.it/aas6fww4zvwf1.jpeg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4bd45350caaefa296856e086edfd320db4c4a067
We have a full front yard veg garden for 6 years now. We have a giant tree in the back so too much shade. It has been fabulous. We live on a semi busy street so people stop and chat and ask questions whenever we are out. We have very little theft.
This is our current garden from our second story window.
https://preview.redd.it/jrbbo8j16wwf1.jpeg?width=4032&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2586ed299feaf9818b8b0ce7337b54fcb1df6bcf
I’m a front yard vegetable gardener because it has the best conditions and I didn’t like maintaining the grass. I own my townhouse in a place with explicit urban farming protections so I’m actually not the only front yard vegetable garden in the neighborhood.
I wish more people would give up the grass and plant vegetables and pollinator gardens. I’m sure it will be amazing.
I planted an inground garden in my front yard it looks nice
I think almost anything is better than grass.