Early garden design - making a design plan and flexible priorities

If you are doing a DIY yard and garden, you are undoubtedly working on a budget. Otherwise, you would hire people to do it for you and get it finished while you drink iced tea. As usual when doing a project: think it through, make a plan, check prices, decide priorities, and be realistic. I know my yard will be several years in the making and the plan will evolve during those years.

For my yard, I had certain priorities. I would start on the backyard, then the next summer, I would do the front yard. The beginning steps for both would be the same. First, I needed to remove the gravel. Second, I HAD to improve the soil. Once the soil amendments were tilled in, I could do some “design work.”

The backyard when I moved in - Ack!

My backyard is long and narrow, has a young blue spruce at both ends, a spring blooming forsythia, a clump of chrysanthemums and not much else. I needed a path. I laid out potential lines for the garden path using a garden hose. This is a cost-free process that gives you a big visual aid that you can shift around easily. A hose is heavy so it won’t blow around if you have wind - far better than string, and it is visible enough that you can really get a sense of the layout of potential gardens and paths. Then, it is simple to make the lines straighter or curvier as you work with the design and walk through the future garden.

My first path from my backdoor to my shed was curvy and lovely. I shifted it several times as I walked it because in fact, I would rather walk a straighter line and just get to where I am going.

Next, I placed my plants in the backyard. The spring before I put my house on the market, I had potted up a bunch of plants that I knew would be able to withstand the move and neglect while I was packing and unpacking. This is not something that everyone can do, but because I was moving across town and doing it over the course of several weeks, I could take part of my old garden to help establish the new one.

I set the pots out so I could visualize what they would look like. Unlike the hose which gave a strong visual, I had to really put my imagination to work for the end picture. Now if I had a formal design, I would have had a paper plan to help me picture the final garden. (And this is what I will do with my front yard, since I live in an HOA.) I shifted the pots around over a couple of days and then planted the poor neglected plants into the improved soil and rolled up the hose.

The backyard by the middle of my 1st summer. Many of these plants came from my old house. Some are annuals from seed. I used old fence panels to reduce the amazing reflective glare off the white plastic fence. That project isn’t finished yet.

When the the sprinkler system was finally installed the next summer, I put the hose down again, so the garden borders were obvious.

Digging the main trench for the irrigation line during my 2nd summer. The plants are again a mixture of perennials and annuals from seed. You can see the hose outlining the garden.

I don’t know if I would do it again in that order, but I couldn’t afford to do both front and back yard in the same year, and the irrigation system couldn’t go in until both yards were gravel-free and improved. I wanted my plants to get established before that. I watered by hand and celebrated when I got my first sprinkler system ever to water for me.

I wasn’t planning to buy trees in my first year, but here is where flexibility pays off. I found good quality trees and shrubs on sale during the fall of my 1^st year. I bought them and put off the purchase of stepping stones instead. Later priorities include planting for shade, trellises to disguise my shed, getting my front yard design submitted to the HOA, finding low water grass and plants for front yard for xeriscaping, and putting in the paths around the sides of my house to my front door. Many updates to come!