Using Every Nook and Cranny

When you look out at the typically suburban lawn what do you see?

​Some see a beautiful manicured space that is great for playing on lounging on and gives your house great curb appeal.  Whiles others like me see a mostly wasted, severely underutilized space that could be put too much better uses like growing food and creating pollinator habitat.

This diagram shows what was in the backyard when we bought the house

This diagram shows what is in the backyard now.

Whether you subscribe to the former or the latter doesn’t really matter to me because I want you to consider the middle approach.  You can have your cake and eat it to in this case by not devoting yourself to one viewpoint entirely. I arrived at this conclusion because a compromise I had to make with my wife.  We bought a house a couple of years back and I just wanted to go hog wild with the landscaping and cram a much food producing trees, shrubs and garden space that I could into the backyard.  She however was not entirely enthused by that idea and instead want to have a large lawn in the backyard for the uses mentioned above.


So here we were at a slight impasse on the best way to use the tiny .2 acres available to us in a way that would meet our desires in a shared home space.  The solution we eventually arrived at was to give me the lower third of the yard and all the fence edges to use how I would and the rest would stay your typically suburban lawn.


This compromise forced me to think creative then and continues to do so now.  To achieve what I wanted, (food producing utopia) with what the wife wanted (a large expanse of grass) I had to get creative in my placement and species selection of my plants.   
To show you what I mean I have two diagrams that I made that show the before and after layouts of the backyard.             

Spring 2016

To the left you can see a diagram of what the backyard looked like when we bought the house.  For the sake of clarity i didn't include the clothesline (which we still have) and I also didn't try to depict the slope of the property.  

The yard actually slopes down away from the deck and firepit to run into the neighbor's yard and a retaining wall which raises the grade of my yard quite substantially.  But as is it has the large bit of lawn surrounding the large shady cottonwood tree. This is of course exactly what I didn't want so I set to changing some things according to the Great Backyard Compromise.  

Winter 2019

As you can see  I have made just few changes trying to take advantage of the available space my wife would let me have.  Since we bought the house I have added the following to the backyard,

• 2 pear trees and 1 twist apple tree
• 430 square feet of annual garden space
• 3 grapes vines
• 1 gooseberry bushes
• 2 currant bushes
• 1 cherry bush
• 2 honeyberry bushes
• 24 square feet of strawberries
• 2 compost bins
• a lawn and garden shed
• new and improved fire pit

Wheew… what a list.

I have pretty much maxed out my available space in the yard without risking the great compromise.  But I like to think I have been living up to the title of this article which is to use every nook and cranny available to me to grow delicious tasty things.  

But that's not all this upcoming summer the wife wants me to add some planter boxes to the deck so I can get rid of all the unsightly pots that clutter up one of the deck corners.  So I will be adding yet more planting space on the deck that will also double a benches for outdoor seating. So the moral of the story is that even if you don’t have the perfect setting for growing beautiful tasty things if you figure out how to use the out of the way underutilized spaces in your yard that you can have a great yard and grow delicious things in it too.

For more information on things like this check out other articles on the Green Living Library.      

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