After much playing around, talking, drawing, arguing and generally having fun, Frank and I came up with this basic garden design for the new veggie garden that we hope to start this year. We drew it probably a hundred different ways on paper, and finally had a rush of brain to the head and cut them out on paper so that we could move the pieces around at will. Frank stumbled on this particular layout, and we both said “that’s it!” at the same time.
So to decipher this design: The large rectangle box thing at the center bottom, that’s my future potting shed. In particular, we ordered the plans from Jamaica Garden Sheds, and though they’ll need to be modified because I of course want it bigger than this, they are a great start. So that’s the base of the drawing, and the shed will back up onto the woods, looking out over the garden.
The narrow rectangular box thingies in the drawing are going to be long raised beds. We’ve been discussing what to make those out of (cinder block? wood? railway sleepers?) We want something as permanent as we can make it, but that won’t look tacky. We also want them fairly deep, as the soil out in this future bed is probably only a couple of inches deep, and full of tree roots and rock. I’d like to be able to sit on the edge of the beds, if possible, so really don’t want them just to be boards.
There’s something fun about sitting at the table, surrounded by seed catalogs, designing the garden while a winter storm rages outside. We tried to make lists of all the veggies we each wanted to grow in these raised beds, and the list was very long! Here are the ones we want.
So while we were discussing veggies, we of course figured out the other things we wanted. In particular, the central part of that design is a formal herb garden, something I’ve always wanted. There aren’t a lot of herbs that we can grow here in zone four, of course, but these are the things I’ll try in some sort of round, formal herb garden. I think I want a water feature of some sort in the center of all this.
And just because we were already making lists, and trying to get down on paper all of the things we want, here are the miscellaneous things that we don’t want to forget and need to plan for in the grand estate design.