According to Axiom Marketing Insights, 2024 gardening trends will include rehabbing your front yards, starting and expanding vegetable gardens, and adding unique fruits and vegetables to your growing garden.

Gen Z leads the way into these top three gardening trends in 2024. In this blog post, you’ll learn how to

• Improve your curb appeal
• Create a vegetable garden and expand it
• Explore your green thumb with new plant varieties.

Project Idea 1: Improve Your Curb Appeal

Do you want to have the best-looking front yard in your neighborhood? Or maybe you want to bring joy to everyone who walks by your house. Either way, improving your curb appeal increases your property’s value and welcomes everyone visiting your home.

Your front yard may be flat, but you can maintain a green, healthy lawn.

Use landscape lighting to guide everyone to your front porch with flowers growing along a walkway and landscaped areas with trees.

Conversely, you may have a sloped front yard where you can develop a tiered landscape on a retaining wall. You can add a garden structure, such as an arbor, to guide your friends and family from the front of your home to your backyard.

How do you improve your front yard’s curb appeal?
Here are four ideas:

1. Incorporate a theme for the front of your home that complements your house’s architecture. For example, if you have a cute bungalow built in the 1930s, you want landscaping that meshes with that house’s style. HGTV has an extensive list of themes you can pick from to improve your front yard in their article, 80 Lush Landscaping Ideas for Your Front Yard.
2. Add a punch of color, texture, and height with various ornamental grasses, native plants, and flowering shrubs. You can also use shrubs and trees to add height and texture different from perennials and annuals.
3. Add a walkway garden and potted plants by any steps leading to your home and front porch.
4. Outdoor lighting provides safety, interest, and direction. You can also use landscape lighting along walkways and steps to accent a focal point or a favorite tree.

Project Idea 2: Creating a Vegetable Garden & Expanding It

If you’re a new homeowner or have been at your home for years, you can create a vegetable garden in a sunny place on your property. The Old Farmer’s Almanac has an informative article called, The Basics of Planting and Growing a Vegetable Garden.

This article covers the basics of starting a new vegetable garden, including garden designs, how-to tips, and links to other gardening-related articles on their site.
Location, location, and location are keys to having a successful vegetable garden. You want to put your garden in a sunny space. Map out your garden on paper to see how much space you’ll need to dig to add a raised bed and ideas for planting in your new space.

Here are 15 helpful tips for successfully growing an abundant vegetable garden this spring:

1. Pick a sunny place with 6 to 8 hours of direct sun daily for most kitchen gardens. Lettuce, kale, and other leafy vegetables can handle some shade.
2. Call 811 before you dig out your new garden to ensure you won’t dig into any underground wires. A technician will come to your property and show you where underground wires are located.
3. Avoid the wind. You don’t want to start your veggie garden in an area with a lot of wind. Young plants will be blown over, bees can’t do their pollinating jobs, and your soil will dry out faster.
4. Start with a smaller garden plot; you can expand your garden later. The Farmer’s Almanac advises to start small with a 10’ by 10’ garden plot, which is 100 sq. ft. You and your family can pick three to five veggies and buy them as starter plants for your freshly dug garden.
5. Leave space to walk between rows to pull weeds, pick produce, and water your plants.
6. Do a soil test before you plant. Your county extension provides soil testing; you can contact them or buy one at your local garden center. Your soil test results will include the recommended NPK (nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium) levels you need in fertilizer. Your soil test results should also include pH results. Your garden soil should have a pH of 6.0 – 6.5. Add elemental sulfur to your soil if your pH is above those numbers. If the garden soil is too acidic (below 6.0), you’ll need to add lime to get it up to the 6.0-6.5 pH level.
7. Ensure you have well-draining soil, so vegetable plants don’t sit in soggy water. You can fix poor drainage, plant at a different spot, or use raised garden beds.
8. Add compost to the garden soil to enrich it with nutrients and promote more robust plants.
9. Pull weeds and put down newspaper to smother any remaining weeds. Preen® is a popular weed control for gardens. Take extra time to control weeds, especially if you’re transforming a lawn into a garden plot.
10. Start a compost bin near your garden to collect grass clippings, leaves, eggshells, and coffee grounds to create your own “black gold.” Compost turns into earthy soil similar to what grows in the forest, and it’s filled with nutrients.
11. Group garden plants together based on their watering needs. For example, plant agave, aloe, and sedum together since they’re succulents and don’t need as much water as bee balm and zinnias.
12. Label your plants. If you’re like most people, you won’t remember what you planted where. When you add labels painted on wood or specialty labels, you’ll recognize the name of each plant.
13. When you water your garden plants, avoid sprinkling their leaves. It causes mold and other diseases. Instead, irrigate your plants at their root level so the water goes right to the root system where your plants need it.
14. Add mulch to your newly dug garden. Don’t use bark mulch or mulches that you would use in landscaped beds. Instead, use straw, hay, chopped leaves, bagged organic garden mulches, and compost.
15. Don’t be afraid to expand your garden, especially if you want to try new vegetable varieties.

 
For example, you can design your expanded garden to include a row of herbs and cut flowers. Add pavers or flagstones in the middle of the garden so you can walk to each row comfortably. Design your garden expansion following the above tips.
  

Project Idea 3: Explore Your Green Thumb: What New Varieties Are Available

If you love experimenting with new varieties, whether annuals, perennials, vegetables, or fruit, you must collect gardening catalogs to find these new varieties.

For example, the National Garden Bureau (https://ngb.org/new-plants/) has a page to search for new varieties by category, year, common name, and plant type.

While trying new plant variations is fun, be sure they won’t pose an invasive risk to your area. Put “invasive plant list” in your favorite search bar and see what comes up in your neck of the world.

You can also click on the Green Thumb Award on the National Garden Bureau’s site to see which new varieties won awards in assorted categories.

Summing Up

According to Axiom's gardening trends, Gen Z homeowners will focus on three categories. These include sprucing up your front yards, planting and expanding vegetable gardens, and planting new variations of vegetables, fruits, and other plants.

Expanding your vegetable garden follows the same advice as digging out a garden bed for the first time. Soil health is one of the top tips, along with weeding, mulching, and garden design.

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Sources:
Almanac.com, Vegetable Gardening for Beginners: The Complete Guide.
AxiomCom.com, Axiom Marketing Insights: 2024 Gardening Outlook Survey (pdf).
BHG.com, 10 Handy Tips for Planting or Expanding a Garden.
HGTV.com, 80 Lush Landscaping Ideas for Your Front Yard.
NGB.org, Green Thumb Awards.
SecondNatureOutdoorLiving.com, Increase Curb Appeal with Front Yard Landscaping.