7 Garden Features You Need to Consider When Buying a House

Are you house shopping? Hoping to start a garden or urban homestead at your new house? Here are garden features you need to look for.

Most real estate agents will say that location is the most important criteria to consider.

While that is important, most home shoppers consider the inside of the house such as the floor layout, the finishes and the general ambience to be the most important.

And then you have gardeners and want-to-be homesteaders that are going to rate outdoor spaces high on their list of must-haves and will be picky about what they can accept.

So how do you balance your needs for the right location, the right house and the right garden features? You can achieve all of them, assuming you have a reasonable budget to purchase a house and some time to search for just the right place.

I’ll focus on the outdoor spaces of course in this post.

Sun Exposure

Please note that the assumption is that you live in the Northern Hemisphere. If you live in the Southern Hemisphere you will need to swap north for south.

Your property and house orientation and surroundings have a huge effect on how successful your outdoor spaces will be for growing food crops. Sun exposure is one feature that is hard to change if you don’t have it or don’t have it in the right spot.

Since you likely want to grow vegetables or fruit, you need a decent amount of sunshine for a large part of the day. Where you have that concentration of sunshine will matter and ideally you want that to be in your backyard, behind your house.

But why the backyard for growing food crops?

backyards are usually fenced in, protecting your crops from certain animals such as deer; if there is no fence or it is not high enough, bylaws usually allow for taller fences in back rather than in front.
many people still see vegetable gardens as not something that they want to display to their neighbours (although that is changing), so the front yard is out in terms of growing vegetables there. Some bylaws or Home Owner Associations (HOA) also don’t allow growing food crops in front of your house. More on that below.
kitchens usually are located at the back of the house and have a door leading to the backyard, making it easy to step out to get a few fresh tomatoes for a salad or cut a few herbs for a stew or soup
outdoor kitchens with barbecues are usually in the backyard, again making it easy to grab something from the garden to throw on the bbq
backyard gardens are hidden away from passerby’s if you are the type of person who doesn’t want to share their harvest freely
if you live on a busy street you may not want to grow vegetables too close to the street due to pollution from cars and salt spray from winter road salting if you live where there is lots of snowfall

So if you are only considering growing food crops in the backyard, ideally you want your prospective house oriented so that the backyard is facing south. This will maximize the sun exposure.

You can also get away with a backyard with west exposure, like I have. However you don’t get too much sun in the morning, so everything takes longer to warm up. But in the afternoon you may have too much sun and will need to shade crops that don’t like the sun blasting on them all afternoon.

East exposure is okay as you will get sun starting first thing in the morning. However in cooler climates your garden will be in shade for the hottest part of the day in the afternoon, making it harder to grow sun-loving food crops.

North exposure is a tough one to deal with. You will get some sun in the early morning and then again late in the afternoon but you will find it hard to grow any vegetables that need a good 6-8 hours of sun or more. Good for growing some greens perhaps but that is about it.

Sun exposure is of course also going to depend on how tall the house is, how large the property is, what trees already exist on the property and your neighbour’s structures and trees. But if you have the wrong orientionation it could mean having your food crops in an odd location to avoid the shadow of your house.

Irrigation system

This might at first seem to be a nice-to-have garden feature and even a luxury, but if you have very dry summers with little rain like we do, you will be glad to have an automated irrigation system.

Yes, you can add it later but it does cost quite a bit of money for the materials and labour. Installing a system later can also be very disruptive to established planting and hardscaping such as paths and structures.

What you want to look for if the house has an irrigation system is that it is split up into zones. This way you have adequate water pressure when watering. A system that has too much on one zone will see a huge drop in water pressure as it tries to provide enough water to all of the sprinklers heads.

One thing to consider and something that I plan on working on as I find time on my own, is to convert an existing sprinkler system to a drip or micro irrigation system. It will help you save water over a conventional sprinkler system.

Without an irrigation system you will need to hand water frequently during dry spells to avoid losing plants. And trust me, that is a time-consuming task that ends up sometimes not being done and then your plants will suffer.

So if your house-to-be has an irrigation system, consider that a huge bonus in making your garden maintenance easier. Which means you can grow more!

Fruit and Nut Trees

When we looked at our current house when it was on the market, one garden feature we really liked was the mature fruit trees in the backyard. I’ve written before on the value of having your own orchard so I won’t repeat the whole story here on the abundance we have in our garden.

Fruit and nut trees can be planted of course but usually take several years to establish enough to bear a decent crop of fruit. A house with an established orchard of fruit trees is therefore almost priceless.

Buying a medium sized tree can be very expensive, depending on the variety. And you have the hassle of getting it home, planting it an