Front Yard Garden Update

In the spring of 2016 we converted the front yard of our house into a garden. My wife and I had been interested in doing this for some time. We had begun killing the grass in the fall of the previous year, but a huge amount of work remained, and with a hard deadline to finish in time to seed the garden in the short Saskatchewan summers.

I wanted to approach the project with a lot of planning. I was concered about the amount of shade certain areas of the front yard get, and what plants to grow in the different areas. Because it was winter already, just looking at which areas are shaded would not be a good guide to how the shade would be distributed in the middle of sumer. I started by uploaded the satellite image of the property from Google Maps into a free program called Sketch Up. The program will know your latitude from the location you pulled from Maps. Based on this it can display accurate shadows based on the time of the year that you pick. From there it is just a matter of building a model of the houses which will be casting shadows and uploading models of trees that match the local trees from the program's free model library. I picked a date of mid-June as a benchmark to "heat map" the shade. In the model I generated bright green represents 0 hours of shade, while dark red represents 0 hours of sunshine. Now that I had an idea of what could be grown where, it was time to start planning layout.

One of the things I really wanted was a good mix of hardscaping objects in the garden that would act as focal points around which the garden could be planted. The first item we built was an garden obelisk. The obelisk would act as both a focal point as well as add vertical interest to the garden. I adapted the design from this site. I was very happy with the results. We decided to position the obelisk at an angle when viewed from the street (point to the street rather than flat side) as it seemed to increase the "substantialness" of it since you see every strut, rather than them being hidden behind each other.



The next task was rock work. Because the yard slopes fairly significantly towards the street I wanted to split the yard into two flatter tiers so that when I ran a sprinkler on it the water wouldn't just run right off into the street (and bring soil with it). We happen to have a large amount of limestone boulders and flagstone that had previously been used to suppress weeds between the house and the fence line. We used the rocks to create small "U" shaped lower tier as well as flagstone path that leads from it to the house through the centre of the garden.

The final hardscaping item added to the garden were raised bed boxes at the very corner of the property (the only good picture I have of these is from the fall). These added a nice anchor point to this corner of the yard as the other edge ends in the driveway. They also provided a convenient way for the rock wall to end and reduce the amount of rocks required.

Once all the hardscaping was done it was just a matter of planting in between. I also used potted trees and plants to fill in spaces and gaps as they developed over the course of the summer. I'll get into the potted trees and plants in another post.

Fig Tree Update

I stored my Chicago Hardy fig at my parents' farm over the winter in a part of a barn that they keep heated. I got this tree as a root ball from T&T seeds in the spring of 2015. After an intial struggle it took off and grow to about 15" tall by the fall. After all the leaves had fallen off and after it had experience a few frosts I took it indoors before it got really cold (although this winter there hasn't been a whole lot of that).

The room that it was stored in stayed a little above zero for the last few months. About three weeks ago I brought it home and just kept it inside. It took about a week and a half for the buds to start developing and it has been growing very rapidly since. Last year my wife bought me an X-Up Flowerhouse Pro Greenhouse from Early's in Saskatoon. Because of the large amount of space that this now gives me I decided to give the fig a bit of a head-start on the year in the hopes that it will guarantee me at least one ripe fig by fall. Considering that I have yet to taste a fresh ripe fig I figured this would be useful before I get too excited over them. Regardless of whether I get fruit this year I do love the look of the foliage on figs. They have a very tropical look to them (at least to this boreal dweller!).

I've been perusing the website figs4fun and figsforlife and they've both been providing me with some excellent information on what to expect in terms of pruning, how the figs develop and variety information. Figsforlife is a Canadian site and their rates look very reasonable and they also ship across Canada. If I hadn't already bought so many fruit trees this year I would definitely be making some purchases there. Oh well, there's always next year.