Shade Gardening Tips

If your garden has areas with no direct sunlight, or indeed has no sunlight at all, you need to learn some tips associated with shade gardening. There are a number of things you can do to help things grow without the help of natural sunlight, and there are also plants that can grow without it. Having a shade garden doesn’t mean that you can’t have a nice garden!

First of all, take a look at your garden layout. Monitor it for a few days. Make a few copies of a rough sketch of your garden shape. Every hour, mark on the sketch where the shade is in your garden. If, over the course of several days, there are areas which are permanently shaded, those are the places that need special shade garden attention and planting. Will pruning back any tree branches help increase the light in those parts of the garden?

Next, with the help of gardening magazines, and experts at your local garden supplies company, create a garden design that will allow you to highlight the shaded area of your garden, rather than have it disappear into the dark.

Learn which plants actually love the shade best. When creating your garden design use these plants to create light! Using bright colorful flowers such as yellows and gold, you can allow the colors to draw attention into the area, and make it appear less shady.

Fruit and Vegetables in the Shade

It is possible to grow some fruits (mainly berries), and vegetables (mainly root crops) in shaded areas, but it depends how much shade you actually have as to how well they’ll grow. Yields will be much smaller than similar ones grown in sunlight.

Don’t allow the shade to put you off gardening. Learn about the shade, and work with it so that every part of your garden is part of the design.

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