Gardening isn’t just a good habit for your own health and wellbeing. More greenery boosts the air quality of the surrounding environment by absorbing even more carbon from the atmosphere. If you’ve already used up all the space in your yard but wish you could still cultivate more plants, then perhaps you should consider a walled garden.
Not everyone is so fortunate to already have an existing wall to garden on, but sustainably building a wall for your garden from reclaimed stone or brick can be a fun DIY project to do on a sunny weekend. Here are some benefits and reasons you should create your own walled garden.
An extended growing season
Walled gardens get warm more quickly in the spring and cool more slowly in the fall because the thermal mass of the stone walls helps regulate temperature. This means that while other parts of your garden might not have anything to harvest until around late May or early June, you will likely be able to harvest spring greens off your walled garden in March (depending, of course, on the climate you live in).
A protected micro-climate
Whether you live in a cooler or warmer climate, the rest of your garden will benefit from the protected micro-climate that a walled garden provides. In colder climates, walled gardens allow gardeners to grow plants that typically thrive in warmer climate zones. If you live in a warmer climate zone, then your walled garden offers protection from the high summer heat by casting shade. This means that you can expect greater productivity from the surrounding plants.
Privacy, quiet, and calm
If you live by a busy road or in a house that sits tightly between your neighbors, then a walled garden will give you much more privacy than a fence or a hedge. Your garden should be your personal oasis where you can sit back and relax, undisturbed. A walled garden can add an aspect of tranquility and quiet that you might be missing.
Vertical surfaces for training plants or for vertical gardens
A walled garden offers more options for vertical growing because it provides more space. You can add climbers and wall shrubs along the edges, and you can even train fruit trees to grow up the walls.
A walled garden may be a bit of effort to put together at first, but if you use reclaimed materials and design them to suit your needs, they can be a sustainable and environmentally friendly way to further establish your growing area.
