5 Unique Ideas For a Beautiful Vegetable Garden

unique vegetable garden ideas
 

The first few years of establishing a vegetable garden are focused on learning the ins and outs of growing vegetables.

You’re figuring out when to plant each vegetable, which of the thousands of varieties of tomatoes you like best, and how to tell the difference between weeds and newly sprouted vegetables.

Mastering the details of gardening keeps you busy for those first few years.

But once you settle into the practice of growing your own food, it’s time to delve into the art of it.

I firmly believe that vegetable gardens don’t have to be strictly utilitarian. You don’t need to relegate it to the back corner of your yard. You can actually elevate it to be the centerpiece of your landscape.

At my house, my vegetable garden explodes from my front yard each season in a riot of color, texture, and life. My neighbors stop by often to tell me I have the most beautiful garden in the neighborhood.

Your vegetable garden doesn’t have to be simply a place to grow food to feed your body. With a little extra effort, you can intentionally design a garden that also grows plenty of beauty to feed your soul.

In this article, I’ll share five unique vegetable garden ideas you can employ to elevate your garden from ordinary to amazing.

unique vegetable garden ideas

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How a Beautiful Vegetable Garden Adds Joy to Your Life

Like most gardeners, I’m a highly visual person. I need to have beauty around me. It comforts me, inspires me, and lifts my spirits when I’m having a sad or stressful day. It’s what I feed on to survive.

Inside my home, I surround myself with others’ artwork. I love bright colors, vegetable garden art (of course!), and clean lines.

Outside my home, I surround myself with my own artwork – my garden. I love the deep beauty and joy that having a garden brings to my life.

My garden is right outside my living room window and when I wake up in the morning I peek through the curtains to get a breakfast dose of visual garden candy.

It’s difficult to put into words the internal spiritual lift I get when I catch a glimpse of my garden. It’s like my heart pauses for a little back flip of joy.

My daily inspiration is found within that garden. Just a few minutes tying up tomato branches, deadheading flowers, or harvesting a brightly colored vegetable is enough to center and ground me.

My garden needs to produce a lot of food for my household. But I also want my garden to be beautiful. I want to walk out my back door and be overcome by the loveliness all around me.

Over the years I’ve learned it’s very possible to focus on both of these objectives at the same time growing food and growing beauty.

Why shouldn’t your garden feed both your body and your soul?

 

Garden Beds

5 Unique Vegetable Garden Ideas to Try This Year

Unique Vegetable Garden Ideas #1: Create a Permanent Garden Design

This year, take some time to create a permanent design for your garden. This means laying out garden beds and paths instead of just planting in a tilled up area in long rows.

You don’t necessarily have to build raised beds out of dimensional lumber, but there should be some overall organizing structure to your garden. Easy raised garden beds can be constructed out of lumber, logs, stones, or mounds of your own soil.

You can keep your design simple, or harness your creativity and create a garden in the shape of a peace sign or mandala.

I like to view the beds and paths as the canvas of the garden. They’re the backbone that neatens up your design, adds visual interest, and provides a set area where you’re going to use plants to paint an interesting design throughout the season.

In this article, I share how I designed and built my vegetable garden and outline three different options for garden beds: How to Make An Easy Raised Garden Bed.

 

ideas for a beautiful vegetable garden

Unique Vegetable Garden Ideas #2: Express yourself through your garden

Think about how do you decorate the inside of your house. Do you have favorite colors, hobbies, or art that attracts you?

If so, how can you start to weave these symbols of personal expression into your garden to make it more “you”?

Express Yourself Idea #1: Favorite Colors

Featuring a favorite color or colors throughout your landscape is a way to really bring some personality to your garden. My neighbor loves orange, so her trellises, garden gate, chairs, and art are all this color.

My favorite color is turquoise. I have an accent wall in my living room that’s painted this bold color. Turquoise can also be found throughout my house in pillows, rugs, art, and even my clothing!

When I built a wooden obelisk for my garden a few years ago, I painted it turquoise (of course!). It now serves as a centerpiece of my front yard garden and I feel happy whenever its pop of color catches my eye.

There are lots of ways you can incorporate your favorite colors into your landscape – flowers, pots, art, trellises, furniture, watering cans, and tools. I wish they made more turquoise garden supplies!

unique garden ideas

Express Yourself Idea #2: Artist-Made Accents
Is there an art form you’re attracted to and is decorating the inside of your house? Mosaics, glass blowing, ceramics, metal art, and sculpture are all easily transferable to your garden. Can you think of some ideas on how to bring them outside?

Taking an afternoon to walk around a local art fair and specifically hunting for things for your garden is a fun way to spend a day. Or, order online directly from artists on Etsy. You can check out my favorite garden art at this link.

Two art forms I love are ceramics and metal art. My yard features a ceramic birdhouse made by my neighbor and a totem I found at a local art fair. Over the years I’ve also picked up various metal trellises and small sculptures to add to my vegetable garden and the surrounding yard.

This article about unique garden gifts has some additional ideas!

Express Yourself Idea #3: Made By You!
Maybe you’re an artist or craftperson! If so, you should definitely come up with some projects to add your artistry to your garden.

I’ve dabbled in mosaic art over the years and one winter I committed several weeks to designing and creating a mosaic birdbath. It’s a dramatic piece that brightens up my yard with its sparkly mirror and blue glass.

I live in a cold climate, so at the end of the gardening season I pack my garden art away into the garage. It’s such a fun and uplifting spring ritual each spring to take it out, clean it, and decide where it’ll go that year. Things tend to move around my yard this way, which adds a layer of surprise for visitors.

This season express yourself by incorporating one of these three unique vegetable garden ideas for expressing yourself – add art, a favorite color, or things you’ve created yourself.

vegetable garden ideas for artistry

Unique Vegetable Garden Ideas #3: Add Color With Flowers

The vegetable garden features a lot of green, which is a great color, but it can make the garden seem a bit one dimensional sometimes.

One of the easiest and quickest ways to add beauty to your vegetable garden is to mix in annual flowers. The vibrant pops of color catch peoples’ eyes and draw them (and you!) into your garden.

Personally, I reserve the ends and corners of my garden beds for a little color each season.

I pop in two to three of my favorite annuals at the edges of the beds and fill the rest with my vegetable plants. The play of flowers and vegetables together in a garden bed is a beautiful sight to behold!

My top picks for flowers for the vegetable garden are: zinnias, verbena bonariensis, rudbeckia, salvias and globe amaranth.

Read this post for more inspiration: How to Add Beauty to Your Garden with Flowers

 

vegetable garden bed

Unique Vegetable Garden Ideas #4: Alternate Your Plantings Within Garden Beds

If you have a lot of rectangular beds in your garden, instead of planting long rows down the length of the beds, consider planting in blocks.

You can plant along the width of the bed to create shorter rows of vegetables. The photos above is a great example of this. From left to right I have blocks of: salvia, eggplant, basil, cilantro and green onions.

See how much more interesting the bed looks than if it was three long rows of one of the vegetables?

If you’re ready for a more advanced tip, you can also pay special attention to contrasting leaf and plant shapes. I often place certain plants next to each other that I think will create interesting combinations.

This photo above illustrates this as well – all of the vegetables and herbs I planted in that bed have very different leaf shapes and textures. Side by side their visual contrast adds some interest that catches your eye and draws you deeper into the planting.

Before you plant a bed in your garden this year, take a step back and look at the vegetables you’re planting through this lens – how can you combine them to accentuate their different characteristics?

 

Purple Eggplant

Unique Vegetable Garden Ideas #5: Choose Colorful Vegetables

Don’t just plant the regular garden variety (pun intended!) vegetables year after year – red tomatoes, green bush beans, white potatoes. There’s so much more out there!

If you love eggplant, skip the dark purple globe kind found in the grocery store. It’s so boring. Instead try the neon purple of Dancer, the bright orange of Turkish, or the white of Casper.

Instead of just growing orange carrots, add in some yellow and purple as well. Buy the three different seed packets and mix them into one sowing.

When shopping for seeds and plants seek out varieties that have interesting leaf colors or produce a shockingly bright vegetable. There are electric lavender eggplants, sunny yellow peppers, dark purple tomatillos, and every color of tomato you can imagine.

Search out unique and fun varieties of your favorite vegetables and experiment! You’ll be surprised by how much joy it brings.

Discover seventeen purple vegetables to grow in your garden.

ideas for a unique vegetable garden

Additional Resources for Unique Vegetable Garden Ideas

Workshop
Tap into your creative spirit by adding simple and fun elements to showcase your garden’s beauty. This online workshop shares fresh ideas to elevate an ordinary garden to an extraordinary one with plenty of photos to get the creative juices flowing. Learn how to design a garden that inspires joy, tips for adding artistic touches, and favorite colorful and unique varieties to grow. Find out more here.

More Articles
Because I strive to have a gorgeous vegetable garden every season, I’ve written several articles sharing my best tips for adding color, beauty, and fun into your garden.

Design a Decorative Vegetable Garden with a Rainbow of Colorful Plants

Tips for Growing a Colorful Vegetable Garden

Using flowers to create a stunning vegetable garden

How to Build an Easy & Beautiful Garden Trellis

Books
A lot of my favorite gardening books focus on creating amazing gardens. Browse the list here.

Video
I filmed this garden tour during the height of the season and focus on showing you how I artfully incorporate flowers into my vegetable garden design.

 

 

Focusing on the details of your vegetable garden this season is what will help you elevate it from utilitarian to a work of art to be proud of!

Don’t settle for a humdrum garden this season, strive to make it more fun, colorful and unique. Then watch how it adds a deeper sense of satisfaction and joyfulness to your life.

 

 

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Comments

  • Lovely post! My heart does a little flip of joy when I see my garden too – especially at sunset when the light hits it just right and I’m surprised (again!) by it’s beauty. It’s amazing how growing a garden can feel so nourishing!

  • I’d like to read the post about adding beauty to the garden with flowers but neither of the links worked. How can I find it?
    Loved the ideas in this post!

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