Turning the Plan into Reality Part One!

We have been mulling over the planning of the garden ever since we first inspected the house. We want to make sure we do it right and don't have to re-do anything. But towards the end of last week I had a brainwave with it all and all the elements fell into place. Matt took Friday off so we've had a lovely weekend starting to put all the planning into action!

We're planning to have as much of the veg and fruit garden behind the house as possible, leaving the front as it is (oodles of grass) for now. Down the track we'd love to get some grazing animals to help keep the grass down but we're unsure of what. That is a while away anyway! Also, speaking of the front, we're lining the driveway with a hedge of lavender on either side. It should smell divine!

So below is a photo of my little mud map that came to me quite out of nowhere! I'll do my best to explain it to give you an idea of what we're thinking we'll do with our little piece of Eden.

Firstly, the narrow rectangle running along the bottom of the card is the house, with the back stairs going down to the garden. The squiggly lines coming from the bottom of the steps is a path going off to the clothes line to the right and the parking area and shed to the left. The big blank area to the right of the shed will be edged with bricks and re-gravelled. There will also be a rosemary hedge around this area at the top and along the right-hand side. The little dots to the right of the parking area will be a herb garden with culinary and medicinal herbs. The rosemary hedge will be on the left-hand side of the garden bed and a brick path on the right-hand side. That path will continue past the herb garden, up around the parking area to the left where we'll have the chook house which will open onto the orchard. The line going across the top of the card is going to be a fence to separate the orchard from the rest of the garden so the chooks will have a safe, contained place to free range (away from dogs!). Heading left from the chook house is the bore pump surrounded by a little stand of trees and then beyond that will be the compost bins. We're also thinking about placing a bed of asparagus here because it will be shaded by the shed and should be nice and cool through summer. To the right of all of this will be the veg beds, the eight small rectangles on the card. The veg beds will actually be right up next to the path, but my drawing is not to scale! We're planning to fill up all the remaining space with lots more edible and medicinal plants so that there are lots of windy paths and no grass out the back at all! I'm sure that is a long way off though so we're just taking baby steps for now.

To give it some scale, the shed is a four bay shed. The herb garden is approximately 14m long and 1.5m wide. The fence for the orchard will be about 16m from the back boundary fence of the property. The area we've got organised for vegetable beds initially is 8m x 14m.

Now that I've given a bit of background about what the plan is, tomorrow I'll post more about what we actually achieved over the weekend!