Any garden, whether it’s been designed well or not, has a maintenance area. The difference is that maintenance areas in a well designed garden blend in with their surroundings rather than create an eyesore.
A garden maintenance area is the hub of your gardening resources. Compost bins, worm farms, stockpiled manures and fertilisers and even a place for your garden wheelbarrow. This area may even hold resources for future projects or at least items left over from previous ones.
While these are all essential items for a living, breathing garden there are ways to obscure their prominence on the outlook. And hiding them is probably the best way.
Some of the ways to hide your garden maintenance area are;
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- Hide them behind a shed. This is a perfect place for a maintenance area because of its proximity to all of your equipment as well. Most gardeners when building their sheds will place them as close to a fence as they can in order to maximize their gardening area. This creates a zone where the shed hides the view and the fence defines the area.
- Create a structure that hides them. A project that we have planned in the future is to build a chicken coop but rather than erecting some walls and masking with chicken wire we intend to build a facade of a rustic old house complete with window and door. The majority of this facade will be taken up with the coop while the remainder will store our compost and worm bins plus any other miantenance items.The beauty of this facade is that it will add to the outlook of the garden but will also hide our maintenance are from the view.
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- Erect a fence. I’ve seen this many times, especially wth vegetable gardens. As we know vegie gardens can look quite scrappy if their not designed to be part of the garden vista. Erecting a fence keeps the view simple and ordered and can hide almost anything.The fence doesn’t have to be elaborate but it should be high enough to not draw attention to your maintenance area.
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- The final suggestion is to actually incorporate it into your garden design. This is far more challenging than the other three ideas but done properly can look remarkably great. Your choice of garden style will play a big part if you elect to go this way as some styles will be easier to incorporate than others.
The whole idea of hiding your garden maintenance area is to keep the work area hidden from view so as not to detract from it. The last thing you want in your garden design is for it to be the first thing you see.