Design Change
We've been taking some time this holiday weekend to rest from the physical work, spend time doing fun stuff with the kids, and clean house. A lot of that stone dust we were laying bricks on got tracked into the house, and after a couple weeks of ignoring the toys and the laundry and the clutter, it took a whole day to set things right. But on the Fourth, in between the beach in the morning and the burgers, beer, and sparklers in the evening, we spent some time in the garden fixing up a part of the design we knew we would have to change.
It's kind of windy here in Newburyport. On our second day in the house, for example, this happened:
That is a 60 foot tree that came down right over Atlantis, breaking the fountain and stripping the side of an oak that used to be in that awful raised bed in the middle of the yard. This literal windfall actually helped our design by reminding us that, yes indeedy, that stuff had to go. And I suppose it saved us a few hundred bucks on tree removal in the long run, since one of the four we ultimately had removed (professionally or via an act of weather) was already down.
This past November, the winds blew again, and we woke up to this:
Two fence sections were blown down in another wind storm. I just took this photo yesterday, by the way. We did not wake up to a magic garden installation back in November! Because it was cold and then the ground froze, we never fixed it.
Fast forward to present day, and our kids are good friends with the neighbors' kids next door, running back and forth through that opening every day to play. So we have decided to put a gate there instead of a solid, 6-foot privacy fence. The gate will be half-height and on the right side of the opening. The placement of the gate causes a design change for our berry beds, though.
Our original plan for that area:
From top left downward, we have a tree, a small bed for cranberries, then a break where the grass path continues in the line of the horizontal brick path. Next to the patio are two long beds: to the far left, a long bed for raspberries, and to the right of that, a (slightly wider) long bed for blueberries. Just below those is a rectangle that was the footprint for a proposed garden shed, connected to the rest of the garden by an extension of the wide brick path by the house.
Well, two problems with the original design. First, the aforementioned gate would be leading children to walk directly into the long (and prickly!) raspberry bed. Second, the shed didn't seem like such a great idea once we were actually walking around in that space. It would be convenient, and Kirk would have built it beautifully, but it would have been too tall (8 feet) for that spot, utterly blocking our access to the bit of side yard by the screened-in porch (which is behind that doorway you see to the far left of the bottom of the plan). That blockage didn't seem like a big deal before, but that little side yard is going to make a lovely shade garden, and I am looking to set up my hammock there eventually.
Taking these problems into account, this is what we came up with yesterday afternoon:
Obviously the tree hasn't moved, but we moved our cranberry beds (now we have 2!) a bit further away to reflect the reality that there are way more roots there than we realized when we were drawing up the plan from the comfort of the living room. The future gate will now open to a grass path, and below that are still the raspberry and blueberries, but they extend closer to the house now that the shed is gone. We will see if we can use part of the garage to store garden tools instead; if that doesn't work, we might add on to the back of the garage in the future.
If you are looking closely, you might be thinking that this hasn't been measured and/or drawn very carefully, since things don't quite line up. The overlay reflects the fact that more careful measurements (and some life experience) have shown that our property line isn't square. Also, the brick path right by the house is a foot wider installed than it was in the design, which sets the drawing off a bit. When Kirk builds those boxes to edge the berry areas, I'm sure there will a lot of "splitting the difference" as we place them in real life and not on graph paper.
It's kind of windy here in Newburyport. On our second day in the house, for example, this happened:
That is a 60 foot tree that came down right over Atlantis, breaking the fountain and stripping the side of an oak that used to be in that awful raised bed in the middle of the yard. This literal windfall actually helped our design by reminding us that, yes indeedy, that stuff had to go. And I suppose it saved us a few hundred bucks on tree removal in the long run, since one of the four we ultimately had removed (professionally or via an act of weather) was already down.
This past November, the winds blew again, and we woke up to this:
Two fence sections were blown down in another wind storm. I just took this photo yesterday, by the way. We did not wake up to a magic garden installation back in November! Because it was cold and then the ground froze, we never fixed it.
Fast forward to present day, and our kids are good friends with the neighbors' kids next door, running back and forth through that opening every day to play. So we have decided to put a gate there instead of a solid, 6-foot privacy fence. The gate will be half-height and on the right side of the opening. The placement of the gate causes a design change for our berry beds, though.
Our original plan for that area:
From top left downward, we have a tree, a small bed for cranberries, then a break where the grass path continues in the line of the horizontal brick path. Next to the patio are two long beds: to the far left, a long bed for raspberries, and to the right of that, a (slightly wider) long bed for blueberries. Just below those is a rectangle that was the footprint for a proposed garden shed, connected to the rest of the garden by an extension of the wide brick path by the house.
Well, two problems with the original design. First, the aforementioned gate would be leading children to walk directly into the long (and prickly!) raspberry bed. Second, the shed didn't seem like such a great idea once we were actually walking around in that space. It would be convenient, and Kirk would have built it beautifully, but it would have been too tall (8 feet) for that spot, utterly blocking our access to the bit of side yard by the screened-in porch (which is behind that doorway you see to the far left of the bottom of the plan). That blockage didn't seem like a big deal before, but that little side yard is going to make a lovely shade garden, and I am looking to set up my hammock there eventually.
Taking these problems into account, this is what we came up with yesterday afternoon:
Obviously the tree hasn't moved, but we moved our cranberry beds (now we have 2!) a bit further away to reflect the reality that there are way more roots there than we realized when we were drawing up the plan from the comfort of the living room. The future gate will now open to a grass path, and below that are still the raspberry and blueberries, but they extend closer to the house now that the shed is gone. We will see if we can use part of the garage to store garden tools instead; if that doesn't work, we might add on to the back of the garage in the future.
If you are looking closely, you might be thinking that this hasn't been measured and/or drawn very carefully, since things don't quite line up. The overlay reflects the fact that more careful measurements (and some life experience) have shown that our property line isn't square. Also, the brick path right by the house is a foot wider installed than it was in the design, which sets the drawing off a bit. When Kirk builds those boxes to edge the berry areas, I'm sure there will a lot of "splitting the difference" as we place them in real life and not on graph paper.
Comments
Post a Comment