Planning
I've taken exactly one gardening class, and one of the many valuable things I learned was the habit of sketching out a garden plan. I am a visual / spacial thinker and I find this really helps me get my ideas in order.
Some go into a lot more detail than this - I could have measured it out, gotten the proportions just right. But for me it's more an exercise in thinking with my pencil, rather than a pricise thing.
Now, one can go down quite a deep rabbit hole when it comes to garden planning. Take companion planting, for example. It can turn into an unsolvable logic problem if you think about it too hard, cross-referencing plant friends and enemies against everything you wish to plant. Especially if you are working with just a few square meters. Then there is sun and wind exposure to consider, and ideal plant spacing, and etc.
So far I have done the litteral ground work for the the large square-ish planter bed in this sketch, and put in nearly all the seedlings. It didn't come out exactly as I first envisioned. I had to account for actual plant spacing, and I added and subtracted a few things as I went along.
The idea is to make it a perennial bed. There is an avocado tree - the trunk is the little circle near the centre of the sketch. The tree shades the South corner most, allowing the most sun for the north corner. The shady side will get 5 strawberry plants, fairly generously spaced. The sunny corner gets sun-loving perennial herbs - rosemary, thyme, and sage. The borage in the middle is there because it is a famous friend to strawberries, allegedly improving taste. The siverbeet is there as a sort of placeholder - my plan is to allow the strawberries to put out runners in the Fall, and slowly take over this bed up to the point of the herbs. The borage is an enthusiastic self-seeder, so if I just leave it alone, I should have more than enough borage next year. In fact I will need to weed out the extras.
This is how my gardens grow - a bit of planning, a bit of intuition, and a healthy dash of imagination.
This is how it looked after I got the plants in the ground last weekend:
Some go into a lot more detail than this - I could have measured it out, gotten the proportions just right. But for me it's more an exercise in thinking with my pencil, rather than a pricise thing.
Now, one can go down quite a deep rabbit hole when it comes to garden planning. Take companion planting, for example. It can turn into an unsolvable logic problem if you think about it too hard, cross-referencing plant friends and enemies against everything you wish to plant. Especially if you are working with just a few square meters. Then there is sun and wind exposure to consider, and ideal plant spacing, and etc.
So far I have done the litteral ground work for the the large square-ish planter bed in this sketch, and put in nearly all the seedlings. It didn't come out exactly as I first envisioned. I had to account for actual plant spacing, and I added and subtracted a few things as I went along.
The idea is to make it a perennial bed. There is an avocado tree - the trunk is the little circle near the centre of the sketch. The tree shades the South corner most, allowing the most sun for the north corner. The shady side will get 5 strawberry plants, fairly generously spaced. The sunny corner gets sun-loving perennial herbs - rosemary, thyme, and sage. The borage in the middle is there because it is a famous friend to strawberries, allegedly improving taste. The siverbeet is there as a sort of placeholder - my plan is to allow the strawberries to put out runners in the Fall, and slowly take over this bed up to the point of the herbs. The borage is an enthusiastic self-seeder, so if I just leave it alone, I should have more than enough borage next year. In fact I will need to weed out the extras.
This is how my gardens grow - a bit of planning, a bit of intuition, and a healthy dash of imagination.
This is how it looked after I got the plants in the ground last weekend:
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