Some Garden Plans

I had planned to post this yesterday but reckoned without armed terrorists taking over the US capitol and kind of taking over my mindspace. So here you go!

This year my big garden plan is to get the hardscape fully designed and installed. I'll be making a series of posts as I work through some of it to show you what we have planned, but let's start with the base plan. Here's the big sketched-out garden design.

I'll be walking you through this piece by piece so don't worry about not being able to get what is going on right now. Also as we build it things may change.

In December I took the first steps on this plan, which was to order our new greenhouse (that's why the greenhouse is blacked in on the plan).

This is the image sent to me by the greenhouse manufacturer of the same model we ordered in the size we ordered. We chose the Nantucket greenhouse from Sturdi-Built, and ours will be 12 feet deep by 16 feet long. That is the largest greenhouse we felt would reasonably fit in the back yard. We measured it out on the ground multiple times just to be sure it felt right. As it happens all my orchids will not come close to making that size of greenhouse feel overfull, so we'll have room to grow into the space.

I ordered it built to have 36" tall side walls, so there would be more shaded space near the floor. That will also enable me to build in some cabinets and a garden sink for potting.

We will be painting ours, because the wood look is sexy but a lot of upkeep. I'm going to epoxy seal the wood before we paint it for durability. We have some time to get ready for that because our projected delivery date is April/May.

Later this month, we are going to order a new shed, too. We took down our old metal shed years ago, which was helpful for the house remodel, but meant we no longer had a place to store some of our larger tools. So we decided to buy a prefab shed to store those things. Noel fell in love with a cute little barn shape, so that's what we plan to order. Once we get that organized I'll give more detail; it looks like the delivery dates for these sheds are about four weeks out.

You have to admit it is kind of adorable. You can see on the big plan above that it will go at the back of the yard, so installing it will involve some bee yard re-arrangement. I need to do that, anyway because a skunk was living there last year and kind of made a mess digging holes around the place.

My first big project is to get back to work on the irrigation system. I took a pause over the summer because I got sick (not covid), and then the soil was too hard to dig, and also I didn't have a plan. Now I have a basic plan for the irrigation and it's rained enough that I can get back to digging. It's tedious but it must get done before we can put in the greenhouse.

posted by ayse on 01/07/21