My Suburb Garden: The Plan

By Alyssa, January 15, 2010 8:37 pm

Now that seed catalogs are on their way in the mail and I’m fully committed to this garden, I decided it was time for a plan. I’m a planner so I totally geeked out in the process. I measured every square foot of our southern lawn and bark area. I printing a grid on the computer and designing my future garden area to scale. Here’s what the current area looks like:

Looking east from the fence gate

And from the other side:

Looking west from the grass

Yes, there’s still snow on the ground and I know it’s January, but I’ve got a lot to do prior to planting. I’ve never liked the river rocks by the fence since the bark is constantly blown into them and I’m sick of the monstrous dog house in the middle of nowhere. I want my final product to look like this:

My Nerdy To-Scale Garden Plan

First thing, find a way to move that dog house to the northwest corner of the garden area. This task sounds simple, but my engineering hubby built it. The dog’s house is literally a scaled down home completely framed and roofed to withstand WWIII. Don’t get me wrong, Hubby’s an incredible engineer and I’m proud of his workmanship, but it’s over 400lbs. No, I’m not kidding.

Anyway, task one: Move dog mansion. Task two: build sandbox. What?? That’s right, before I can even start landscaping and gardening, a sandbox must be built. The reality is that I have a four-year-old and one-year-old and these boys are not going to entertain themselves while Mommy’s out messing with the vegetables. Wait, they probably would entertain themselves, but dumping everything out of my dresser drawers and unrolling all of the toilet paper in the bathrooms is not my kind of entertainment. So with my garden planning, I had to include outdoor boy entertainment and a sandbox surfaced at the top of the list. I’ll leave you with this “before” picture as the area will soon include a sturdy WWIII-ready sandbox. Have a great weekend… I’ve got river rocks to move.