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.
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.
