THE DESIGN for the New Home Garden

wow the sun has come out for this video it's been raining for days hence the bit of a shawl here to keep me warm this is nice we've been here at the new house and garden for four months now four months and in that time we've been working on the house inside but also some projects outside josh and i did some work on the shed i painted it last week i built the potting bench for it i've also cleaned out the greenhouse and basically we're getting the back of the house sorted focusing on this it's kind of like the headquarters of what the garden is going to become and in that time we've also covered the back bank in black plastic to kill off the grass without using any kind of weed killers and i've also been just watching the garden and they say that when you move into a new house and garden that you should give it a full year before you actually start planning out what you're going to do now four months isn't a whole year but i have a pretty good idea as to some of the challenges in the garden some of the elements that i want to add where i want to put my beds and also some of the ideas that i had at the beginning i've completely written off and it's a big space it's a half an acre so thinking about where everything's going to go and keeping it there without having to create extra work for later has been one of my goals now on this piece of paper i have a rough sketch of what i'm planning for the garden so the beds different elements it's kind of a visual for how i see the garden and i will show this to you a little bit later on but first i want to take you around the garden a couple of videos ago it was the video how to fix dry soil i planted this planter up and you'll notice that it looks a little bit different the thyme is still growing inside but the sage that was in the center i've taken it out it really really suffered for some reason i'm not quite sure why but the thyme is doing great and so what i decided was to put another plant that grows in very similar conditions this lavender in with a couple of other different types of plants there's some winter savory there and succulents that i've put in maybe temporarily i'm not quite sure i want to show you what the sage looks like though so we'll pop into the greenhouse i'm a little bit reluctant to open the greenhouse at the moment because there's been a lot of news of blight getting people's tomatoes and potatoes and mine are not producing yet they're all green and i'm just feeding them and caring for them and waiting for them to start producing but here is the sad little sage i've moved it in here i'm hoping it recovers it's the purple sage and it was looking so lovely when i put it into that planter and it just started wilting and i gave it goodness three weeks to see if it would perk back up but i don't want to really risk this plant dying so i took it out and we'll find another place for it i guess while we're in the greenhouse we might as well have a look around i've just sewn this up with some mixed lettuces and this is a part of my wormery i'll take you over there in a little bit and we'll have a look but there's lots and lots of potted plants in here including strawberries and i'm taking out to the allotment eventually i've got some greens i need to pot up there are peppers in here and they are growing to a really decent length there's some obergines back here growing not yet producing so it's all looking great in here everything is relatively healthy and i've also started a lot of autumn vegetables so i've got some pak choy here i've got various beets and spinach and what have i put in here it looks like a brassica of some sort or the the japanese spinach comet sooner i'm sure i'm butchering that name i've got fox gloves in here i've also got that tray of cabbage from last week's video here and you can see that they're already starting to germinate the wormery this is where i put some of our kitchen waste and you can see that i can put things like potato peelings leaves greens this is a natty leaf from that aubergine that's in the greenhouse an old sweet potato that went a bit foul and i even put things like avocado skins in there and tea bags and things like that and the worms in here are brandling worms so they're these guys red wrigglers i think they're also called and they basically eat all of that mess turn it into worm castings and they also create worm tea now this is not worm we or maybe it is but it's the leftover liquid from the entire action that process of the worms digesting and the extra moisture that's in the plants leaving it and this is really nutrient rich and diluted i can use this to feed plants that are in containers and over there in the greenhouse i still have loads of plants and pots and a lot of them will be moved out eventually to the garden but i do like keeping some plants in pots just out of convenience and it's just easier to move really tender plants in pots into the greenhouse over winter and protect them so that they can stay alive and come back from year to year and that includes this korean mint which i love okay i have received quite a few questions about an update on the black plastic so if you recall right after we moved in a friend of mine helped me to cover this area with this thick polythene sheeting now the idea here is that it excludes light it excludes moisture as well some of it and it eventually kills all the plants that are growing underneath and i actually haven't even looked to see how it's doing but yes you can see it's it's all pretty much just straw at the moment and fairly easy just to pull back and all of this can be composted now what are the plans for this bank this has been a question in my mind since we moved in as well and my ideas have changed so many times but i have settled on an idea first of all let's go back over to the patio here you can see there's a wooden elevated area here it's kind of dividing the bank from the patio but if you stand at the ends here and look this way you realize that this bank is curved so i would like to get a mini digger in and cut this back to that post there so all of that on that side i want that removed and then i'll use that topsoil in the garden and then have this bank up this way there is lovely aspect and views looking out over the back of here that's not our land that's our neighbor's land but it's a nice borrowed view but what i'm thinking is to put in a little bit more privacy so what i'm planning in the winter is to get bare root hedgerow plants so things like slows and crabapple and rose hips and potentially the exact same mix as the one i got for the allotment and then plant it so that it comes to the height of that forsythia that's right there or slightly lower or a staggered planting that is still a little bit undecided but i would like this area to become a bit more of a wilder hedgerow area and then on the lee side so below it i'll be planting all kinds of woodland hedgerow flowers fox gloves things like that the first project that josh and i are going to be working on for the new garden is putting in some steps there's a slope here and it's very awkward to try to get down into the garden so we are going to dig this out and put in some sleeper steps and that will be a project for next month i'm just going to take you around the side of the house this is the route that i have to take now because there aren't any steps and there's that slope not exactly the easiest slope to navigate and we also found this while we've been living here so you can see that there's different concrete there compared to there and there's this pipe it is what's called a seep away and it's for draining the soil so it's connected to a pipe that's up here on this elevated area in any case it's been very dry at times this summer and we realized that the pipe comes out here and it ends about right there and we could see it because all the grass was brown it's green now because it's been raining but that was really indicative of not really good gardening space so that is going to be a pathway that connects with the stairs coming down here and then the pathway is going to run down this way along here this area over here is going to be beds this is some of the sunniest most sheltered and also the best soil for gardens we also have these trees over here the plum tree actually did produce some plums this year and it's a bit too late to be pruning it i'm just going to leave it see how it does next year but the apple tree which is down here the braeburn apple that is going to need some pruning this winter so plums you need to prune them either in very early spring or in mid-summer so the third week of july here in britain otherwise they can get a disease called silver leaf and it's a fungal disease and you cannot get rid of it apples they can be pruned in the winter when we moved in the grass was all very green and it has been such a revelation watching the change of the grass color this summer and if you look really closely there is a mound running right along there at the bottom of the garden and it comes down from here it goes all the way over to the driveway there and it also has a t-junction going off that way towards this other house and we think that it's also involved in the drainage and the seepaway system regardless it's going to be a really terrible place to garden because i've tried to get a spade and a fork into the soil it is solid and compact and you can see some dry patches right down here it's just virtually impossible this is not going to be a really good place to be gardening but just over it down here this is all very lush soil and there's a natural little dip in the soil as well here so what i'm thinking is that this would be a wonderful place to put in a pond we have quite a big chunk of land over here that is covered in budlia and bracken and blackberries so bramble and we have started taking some of it down and you can see a pile of bud leah just over there but look at this look at what was revealed one buddlia tree grew from here and then arched this way and another buddlia tree growing from there and arching this way so it's a natural arch we are definitely going to be keeping this this mass of ivy and budlia really is disguising that there is quite a bit of space back here and you can see our gas tank and we definitely want to keep that hidden visually and there's so many nettles back here lots and lots of ivy and in the spring when we moved in there were just masses of wild garlic as you can see back here really want to just clear this because this is really good space for us to potentially put in even more fruit trees now that is south facing and i don't want to put fruit trees at the top of the garden because it will shade everything below and then down here we have an absolutely immahusive evergreen tree and if you look closely there's a bird box right up there and i'm not sure if birds are actually using it so i think i'm gonna need to take it down and have a look inside and maybe repair it coming back out to this lawn this is probably going to be the last area that i develop but what i would like for this is more gardening space naturally and the border along there it will need to be dug out and redone it is just a mass of cranesville at the moment there's also dock in there and bracken you can see the bracken just absolutely popping up everywhere but i'm not too concerned about this just yet this is going to be after we tackle that side another consideration here is there is a gigantic sycamore tree here and if you look closely you can see that it's covered in seeds so those sycamore keys and i have sycamores at the allotment and those seeds are an absolute nuisance so i think some tree pruning or rather tree surgery is in order before i start doing anything with this lawn the david austin roses they've been doing great in pots but i know just how large the root system can get and so they definitely need to go out by spring and what i'm thinking now is that they need to grow on a similar type of trellis as they were in the old garden and since we're going to be putting in these steps over here i was thinking it might be nice to put an arch up here at at the top have it arch its way down here and be basically an opener onto the path going down into the garden what i did was i went on to google maps i went to the satellite view and took a screenshot of what our property looked like from the sky from the satellite and then i put it into an app a design app that i know how to use and i created the outlines of all of the the house the greenhouse the shed the areas that are patio or driveway and the boundaries as well so we have a lane down here and there's a shared hedge along here and then everything else i've just left blank and i'm just using a pencil to draw in beds draw in things that i'm thinking this is essentially just thinking aloud or thinking visually so all together so we we went through the garden earlier but this will show you a little bit more of what i'm thinking so we're back here right now this area that's a big question mark right now as is this it will be garden space but we're gonna leave it blank for now because there's plenty more to do so here is the arch that i was talking about with the david austin roses the steps going down and then a pathway before i get to the other elements i do want to show you this kind of shaded area that i've drawn here and here this is what i think is hardcore underneath the soil and it's not going to be a good place to put garden beds and so i've tried to create pathways over that space and also i would like to get a polytunnel and i think this would be a good space to put it now i have this actually wrong way up if you're thinking about it in terms of direction this is south this is north i'm going to turn this back round again because that's how i had it so the back side of this polytunnel that would be south facing and the entire garden gets light all day long except for areas like over here and along the side of the house which are a bit darker compost so this area i'd originally thought about for compost instead it will be over here i'm going to be creating compost the same way that i do at the allotment with pallets and i'm not quite sure about this space over here it doesn't get much light but it might be good for raspberries and keep them from spreading into other parts of the garden i have to think about that though because the soil back here is not great so i would have to do a lot of work so moving down from the top we've got the net the native hedging we've got native wildflowers woodland flowers as well back here hedgerow continuing along here the bank i think the easiest and the most pollinator-friendly planting could be just wildflowers even an annual mix that i put in each year and then various beds and they're just empty and blank right now because they're going to be annual mixed with perennials and i don't know exactly what i'm going to be doing there this will be a perennial kind of woodland planting we're going to keep the existing plum and apple tree i'm going to take out the bud leah though and i might put in some witch hazel along there this along here this will be a perennial planting so there will be soft fruit in here there will be potentially small trees so this is just an area that i'm still thinking about but that's going to be the perennial area another bed here and then the path coming back down to the drive there and then dwindling out at the back here we have an existing hedge down here and this is where i hope to put the pond so right there in the lee of the hardcore under the soil and i think that that will protect the pond from any runoff from the beds so we don't want too much in the way of extra nutrients going in there and causing algae to bloom and i think that this area is just moisture in general and then creating a bit of a a small planting of trees a mini orchard down here at the bottom so this is the bottom of the hill and this is going to be the place that would receive the least amount of sunlight so i'm thinking taller trees would be able to reach up and be able to take advantage of a bit more sunlight [Music] now over here there is a lot going on over here right now that's quite wild and i'm going to leave a lot of the wild stuff there but i do want to take out all of the buddlia or most of the buddlia rather and i'd like to put in the a couple more trees and that arch that was cr created by the budlia i think the best thing to do with that is to remove it and then use it someplace else in the garden as a feature rather than leaving it in situ so trees maybe some shrubs a lavender hedge along here and i haven't decided which lavender or if i'm going to do multiple types of lavender and this area up here i'd like to keep it as perennial flowers so a beautiful border there that's going to be pollinator friendly and that is what i'm thinking of for the garden right now and there are some areas that are blank and i'm still thinking about those have some plans in my mind but they're not really finalized and i will share those with you as soon as i have that more concrete in my mind and that is what i'm envisioning for our half acre of land here and this map so this drawing is very very rough take into consideration that i have a little square showing the plum tree and the apple tree that are already existing and there are so many other shrubs and plants under there this is really just to give me a framework to think about the garden and to basically give it a skeleton that i can flush out as i go along something that's going to be a bit more flexible but that i don't feel lost in creating i can refer back to this i can erase things and change things as i go along and i guarantee you that will happen because i know myself so well but i feel so much more confident having been here for four months and thinking about things and spotting issues before i ran into them by jumping ahead and putting in beds and features and structures and all of that planting trees in the wrong place so yes i'm looking forward to getting started as i said before the one of the first projects is going to be putting in the steps into the bank and once those are in and the archway with the roses and the path stretching down the garden it's all going to fall into place if you are interested in more tips on starting a garden i did put together a video last year sharing how i built the allotment garden and i've also shared a video on permaculture magazine's channel this weekend on how i use companion plants and perennials and my planting styles so definitely check out those two videos and i'll leave links down in the video description let me know what you think as well and what you think of the plan if there's anything in here that you would do differently or any additional ideas that you might have thanks so much for watching i'll see you next time here on lovelygreens bye for now [Music] you

Channel: Lovely Greens

Views: 17,621

Keywords: allotment, grow your own, vegetable gardening, allotment gardening, gardening tips, gardening, edible garden, garden, kitchen garden

Id: SpTKZAs7Y3I

Length: 26min 46sec (1606 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 22 2021