Post #39C Garden Design Series Part 3
Post Description: How to design your South Florida forest garden. Part three of a three-part series.
Take a minute to breathe deeply. If you are in your garden, take two. Ah, here we are.
Part 3 of our garden design series. If you’ve been following along, you may have done some serious brainstorming, talked with household members, and mocked up some ideas by now. If you have, fantastic!
If you are like some of us here at South Florida Forest Garden, you may be powering through the posts before taking action; that works too! The creative process knows no bounds.
If you’ve missed out on the first two parts of this series, go back and check them out here.
It is now time to create the gardening plan, based on the ideas you have honed in on.
Here, we will focus on where and how to implement your garden design using a checklist we devised for you.
Making the Plan
This is where you must get down to the nitty, gritty details to make sure you dig and plant responsibly.
Complete this checklist before moving onto the next steps of your garden planning. This may not be the most fun part of creating a garden, but it is necessary for the safety of yourself, your family, and your community.
Taking care to place your garden thoughtfully can save a lot of headaches in the future. Trust us, it will be well worth your time to do it right the first time around.
Checklist
- Find the survey that came with the house, or take a metal measuring tape and graph paper, and map out your property. Site the house and mark the locations of any permanent features that are already there, such as a pool, large trees or outbuildings.
- Locate the water and electrical meters, air conditioning units and other equipment such as a generator if you have one, and its fuel tank whether above or below ground. If you have an underground fuel tank, you will not be able to plant anything or pave over it. The same goes for a septic tank and any electrical, telephone and cable lines.
- Look up the regulations for these before you plan for anything close to them. Remember that service people need to access all of these at some point, so don’t make that difficult for them. You could lose your landscaping and have to pay for the work done to remove it.
- Do not dig where there are buried cables, or plant trees where they will eventually grow into electrical lines. Someone could get electrocuted and die, so call your local utilities and ask for all cables and lines to be flagged so you can map them as well.
- Draw the sprinkler box and water spigots and mark out at least two feet of access area for each of these. Note where the doors and windows are, and what rooms they look out from.
- When you are done, make several photocopies of this property map.
- Decide which areas will be for private, public or utility use. Draw a pencil bubble around each of these. Draw smaller bubbles around the areas in front of each window and door. Each of these will get a focal point for the view from inside. Draw any existing paths.
- Think of the features on your family “want list.” Which ones might go in what parts of the private and service areas?
- Consider things like sun and shade, and what time of day you might want to use each one.
- If a feature needs electricity, it will be easier and cheaper to site it near the house.
- See how these things will fit in with the views from the windows and doors.
- What doors get used most often? Make sure to map out paths from these to the parts of the garden you will use the most. Is there a door you hardly use at all? How can you make that area more usable? Can you assign a feature to it?
Use your eraser and as many copies as you need until you have come up with a workable plan that gives every member of the family a reason to be excited about this new garden!
This garden design series started out wide, encouraging you to explore your wildest garden dreams, then funneled you right down to the brass tacks of where you can and can’t dig. Our goal here is to guide you to get it right the first time. There’s nothing worse than dreaming and planning for your garden, implementing your plans, then after hours of hard work and sweat, finally sitting down with a nice glass of iced tea to enjoy the fruits of your labor and having someone from the city or the HOA knock on your door. Trust me, we know.
So, learn the rules, figure out which ones you can break, and enjoy the process. Remember, gardening is a journey. Every season and every year presents a new canvas. At the end of the day, it’s your garden.
Let us know how your planning turns out. Did you run into any bumps along the way? Tell us about it! We all learn from sharing our gardening experiences.
Until next time, Happy Gardening!
Mary