The Benefits Of A Sensory Food Garden In Your Own Backyard
Pleasant scents, tastes, sounds, sights and tactile experiences can coexist with growing food. It’s easy to design and create your own sensory food garden.
They affect how you feel.
They are often the deciding factor in what you do and don’t do.
They save you from harm.
They are a large part of your life.
Your senses are very powerful in determining how you feel at any given moment. What you hear, smell, see, taste and feel impacts your life more than you perhaps are conscious of.
Gardens can be a treasure-trove of sources of sensory experiences. Even your food garden or urban homestead can be a sensory garden with careful selection of its elements. How you plan the layout, what you grow and even how you interact with it have an impact.
Let’s look at ways that will create a sensory food garden right in your backyard.
How to Add Sound To Your Sensory Food Garden
Sound can have a huge impact on making your garden tranquil and peaceful. The right sound will set the background for your enjoyment of the garden.
Birdsong
Birds are in most cases a benefit to have in the food garden.
- They can keep insect pests in check.
- They scratch the surface of the soil in search of worms and other tasty morsels, breaking it up.
- Hummingbirds can help pollinate flowers.
Yes, they can be a nuisance as they may eat your newly planted seeds or berries. And in some cases they can damage other food crops too.
However having birdsong as natural background music when spending time in the garden is heaven.
Attracting birds is fairly easy.
- Provide them with a birdbath to drink and bathe in
- Provide nesting locations with birdhouses
- Provide nesting materials such as straw, twigs, etc.
- Feed hummingbirds with a sugar/water mixture in feeders
- Feed birds in wintertime with bird seed and suet
Water Features
Water features are probably the most impactful way to add soothing sounds to your garden.
The sound of a waterfall or fountain splashing provides a peaceful backdrop to the rest of the garden. It can also help to mute the sounds of traffic if you leave near or on a busy street.
We have two ponds, one in the front which is a cement-walled round pond with a statue of a girl pouring water, and one in back that is more natural looking with a small stream and waterfall.
These features can be expensive and time-consuming to build and also require yearly maintenance, but the rewards of having them outweigh the work involved. Without the sounds of a water feature you may wonder: what is missing?
Water features can also help cool down the air in hot weather. Plus larger ponds are a source for emergency water to keep your food crops going if disaster strikes or you are under severe watering restrictions.
If you want to start off small, there are self-contained fountains you can buy, such as these on Amazon. Just set them up, fill with water and plug them in.
Or you can also build your own with a waterproof container, a pump, some water plants and perhaps a small fish or two.
Maybe even raise fish you can eat! That may be a future project for me to try.
Wind Chimes
The other way to add sound that may fit your gardening budget more easily is a wind chime.
There are metal chimes, bamboo chimes and wooden chimes of all shapes and sizes. Pick one that is a soothing sound you like. The bamboo and wooden chimes typically sound very earthy with their thonking sound, while metal wind chimes have higher pitches and more of a mechanical sound.
There are also rules in feng shui of what type of wind chime to hang in various areas of your garden. More info in this article.
Music
The final suggestion is meditation music – often this music has nature sounds such as waterfalls, ocean waves, bird calls, etc. There are varying opinions about this. Some people prefer to listen to the natural sounds around them.
But if you live on a busy street with the constant noise of traffic, try putting some headphones on and listen to meditative music when in the garden. It will help to block out the undesired sounds and bring you a feeling of peace and serenity.
How to Add Smell To Your Sensory Food Garden
Smell can take you back to your childhood. A smell can trigger a fond memory of summers spent idly while on vacation from school. Or the fresh smells of spring with the blossoms opening on trees. Or the earthy smells in fall of ripe pears, pumpkins and fallen leaves.
Smells can also trigger memories of a wedding (your own or friends) or some other important event in your life.
Flowers
Flowers are probably the first thing you think of when looking for ways to add pleasant smells to your garden. Fragrant roses, sweet peas, lilies, lilac or jasmine are just some of the flowers that will perfume the air in your garden.
The good thing is that when you have such flowers in pots or other containers you can move them around if you find them to be too strongly scented. And it also takes some experimenting to find out what scents work well together and which ones need to be separated.
Some flowers also have stronger scents at nighttime so an evening walk around your flower beds is well worth it.
Roses have the additional benefit of having other uses as I’ve written about in the article Why You Should Grow Roses on Your Urban Homestead
Herbs
Other plants that will also impart nice smells are some of the popular herbs such as basil, peppermint, rosemary, thyme and lavender.
These usually require some form of disturbance to release their scents so placement can make a huge difference in how often the scents are released.
We have a lavender plant next to our driveway where I love to grab a flower and rub it between my hands just before getting in the car.
And we have thyme on the edge of the path next to our raspberries where as we pick the fruit, we get this nice smell of thyme wafting over us as we step on the plants.
Pick them, dry them and you’ll have them all winter to use for potpourri, cooking and baking.
Vegetables and Fruits
Nothing beats the smell of a freshly picked peach, a recently pulled carrot or a ripe tomato just pulled off the vine.
When you pick them, you will be able to smell the promise they hold for a great meal. It just can’t compare to the bland vegetables you buy at the grocery store that were picked days or even weeks ago.
Wood mulches
I work with a lot of cedar lumber, building various garden structures such as my raised beds, compost, greenhouse and deck railings. I love cutting and working with cedar, as the aroma of the wood gives me a calm and peaceful feeling.
However rather than spending your time cutting lots of cedar lumber, you can instead get cedar chips to put on paths. After a rain or irrigation you will find the cedar releases its scent, especially if you walk on it.
Other wood mulches may also provide some scents especially if they are fresh – experiment with what you like best.
How to Add Beautiful Sights to Your Sensory Food Garden
Gardens usually are a kaleidoscope of colour and textures. Mainly greens punctuated with whites, reds, pinks, yellows, blues, purples, oranges and even blacks.
Mother nature has a knack in combining colours that work well together, but as gardeners we can of course help her along.
Flowers
Visually nothing beats beautiful flowers in the garden.
They come in all shapes, sizes and colours. While colour is usually the first thing that a person notices, the textures as well help to define the plant and provide interest for the eyes.
In terms of colour sometimes less is more – aim to have a consistent colour palette and beds that have swaths of colour instead of just haphazardly having flowers of every imaginable colour. Yes, I’m guilty of this myself and hope to follow this advice as I gradually improve my flower beds.
You should also keep in mind that having ongoing colour throughout the year can be difficult. Having a wide variety of flowers that bloom at different times works best. And be patient as it may take a few years to get the right balance.
Ornamental bushes and trees
One way to provide visual interest even in the depths of winter is to have evergreen bushes and trees that retain their foliage throughout the year. While they may be covered in snow during the coldest part of your winter, they still provide form to the garden instead of having just a flat expanse of yard.
However deciduous trees can be spectacular too when they are in full leaf. We have a Katsura tree in our front yard and every year in spring it starts off in a muted shade of yellow and red and turns green in late spring. In the fall around October or so it turns a bright orange that is so bright it colours our living room orange in the morning when the sun is shining on it.
Then there are the ornamental cherry and plum trees that line our streets here in Victoria and provide a blossom “snowfall” that other colder areas of Canada are envious of. In Japan the progression of the blooming cherry trees from the south of Japan to the north is documented on the news reports every day in early spring and visitors from around Japan and the world travel to see the amazing show that nature puts on.
Japanese maples are also a popular “transplant” from Japan here in our city and we have one in our front yard next to our pond. While it is already a muted red starting in spring and during the summer, it turns a brilliant red in fall. As with cherry trees, the progression of maples changing colour on the hillsides in Japan is also reported on the news every night in the autumn.
Vegetables and Fruits
It’s not the first thing you might think of when you grow vegetables and fruits. After all we want to pick them and eat them.
But there is beauty in the colours and textures of the food you grow.
Think multi-coloured Swiss chard and beets, frilly kale, bright green lettuce and the little green or purple UFOs (kohlrabi). Then there are the fruiting vegetables such as tomatoes and peppers that come in a multitude of colours.