How to Design a Garden – Our Plans
How to Design a Garden, that is the question I keep getting. Today I will be sharing our plans, how we did it and how we are working on making them come to life. Get ready to see the step by step!
First step in designing a garden is finding the space. While we all might have that dream spot you need to think about what you will be growing and the light that it needs and what time of day. Another thing to think about is water – do you have a source near and will you add irrigation?
How to Design a Garden – Our Plans
Once you think through those things it’s good to make a design. I love to draw things on paper even though I am not a great artist it helps give the idea. I am really visual and can see it as a finished space while when I tell James my plans he needs to see it written down, measured out and really he never truly gets it till its complete, but he trusts my vision.
When making your plans, just be ready for things to change and be ok with it. I will be sharing all our progress and how we changed things but it all works out!
First we marked out our space, yes we should move all the crap haha but that will come!
(If you checked out the last post where we built the raised garden beds don’t miss that!)
We took the raised garden beds and put them in their spots and kept making sure that our garden design was working out to plan, and James could start to visualize it. I know it may not seem like much but its going to be good trust me!
We ordered crushed gravel and pea gravel to put in the garden area. If you know my love for pea gravel we had this amazing spot at our last house and I am so excited!
We first planned to just take out the grass in the spots without gravel, with all the rain we have had it was so muddy and wet that wasn’t working. To get rid of grass and weeds before we love to put down cardboard it breaks down and kills the grass in the process and less trips to the recycle center!
We really didn’t want to chance it with grass and weeds and whatever bugs/worms may come from the ground so we did landscape fabric under it all. Here is some of the process. Next we put down the crushed gravel.
Putting down the crushed gravel was probably the fastest part of the whole garden project, next its time for the garden beds and pea gravel.
Don’t worry we will get that grass around the edges out 😉
One of the parts that took the LONGEST is the measuring and leveling. But really you want to get your garden as LEVEL as you can – its all worth it!
Measure and measure till you get it right! Now lets fill them up!
I will be honest you DON’T want to fill your raised garden beds with just soil. If you do you will go through so much! So gather up all the sticks, branches, wood you can!
Check out Hugelkultur or lasagna gardening!
We used up all the sticks and dried up branches we could find on our property and used them to fill our beds but it sadly wasn’t enough. Our area had a lot of flooding and all the driftwood went to the farmers fields. We took truck load after truck load to fill our beds we helped them and it helped us design a garden.
Here you can see how we filled the beds, there are so many ways to do it just make sure to research and do whats best for your situation.
It was time to fill the garden beds with soil, I have to say we are SO grateful for this tractor! I remember our last house and moving the pea gravel one wheelbarrow at a time so glad we didn’t have to do that this time.
We filled all the beds on the outside then its time to add more!
Here it is!! Its all coming to life. Are you ready to watch everything planted and grow! We have some bare root roses already in waiting to grow up our arbor from Gardeners!
Keep watching for more, I hope you enjoyed seeing how we designed a garden.
