You’re a keen gardener and like to grow your own vegetables for a modicum of self-sufficiency and for fresh, nutritious meals. You love cooking your own food. Maybe you like to eat al fresco, too, inviting friends and family around for summertime meals in a relaxing garden setting. How would you join all these passions together?

One way you can undoubtedly make the most of your outdoor space is to reduce the boundaries between your kitchen and garden (or patio). There are various roads you can go down to achieve this, so your home and garden harmonize better than before.

Seamless Transition

A kitchen and back garden are typically separated by a step down, but if you raise the entrance to your garden (e.g. using a patio or decking) so that it’s level with your kitchen, the two are instantly closer related. To capitalize on this, ideally, you need bi-folding or sliding glass doors, which span most or all of the width of the kitchen. Frameless windows also make for a totally seamless transition between house and garden.

Kitchen Decor & Flooring

Blur the lines between kitchen and garden by using natural, outdoorsy materials in the kitchen. Maybe choose some kitchen units from a Wholesale Cabinets vendor in a wood that complements the patio or furniture you have outside. Textured wood or painted brickwork works well for this kind of thing. If you want to be contemporary, you can install indoor-style rainproof seating outside, too. Using the same or similar flooring inside and out makes the space feel as one. Glossy worktops in the kitchen can sometimes bring the garden indoors through their reflections.

Gardening Indoors and Out

If you want to highlight the garden-kitchen connection, what better way than to grow crops such as cherry tomatoes, kale or salad leaves in containers on the patio? You can also grow herbs or fruits depending on how much sun the patio gets. In any case, a few pots to decorate the patio connects your home and garden even more. For splashes of color, plants such as zinnias or cosmos will work their magic. Remember that gardening indoors and out helps link the two spaces, so you might also consider houseplants in the kitchen area.

Garden Lights

Another way to connect the garden to the house is to make it more visible and traversable at night. Garden lighting can be simple to plan and set up, especially with DIY low-voltage lighting systems where cabling doesn’t need to be buried deeply. Also, energy-efficient LED lights have made solar power more viable, so garden lights needn’t cost anything to run. Aside from letting you see your garden, exterior lights stop the glass mirroring effect from inside that makes the interior space seem smaller.