New Year – New Blog!

This year, I’m going to share with you the process of creating a garden, from the bare-bones up. Ideally, you need to get to know your space for a while – a whole year if possible, before you make any definite plans. This gives you time to see how the area changes over the course of a year – because it will change – light levels will fluctuate, shadows will grow and fade, some parts of the garden will be drier and others wetter, and all these factors influence what will grow successfully in your plot.

If you can, draw a sketch of the space to help you visualise what the options are. Include the things you can’t change – like the location of the house within the plot, boundary walls and fences owned by your neighbours, trees with a preservation order or any feature that you want to keep. It’s also worth including features that are outside your property line but affect the property, like buildings which block light or weather, or neighbour’s trees that cast shade on your garden. Then just sit back and watch!

A few years ago, I went through this process myself. My garden was on a sloping site surrounded by stone walls, with pasture on one side and woodland on another, so my sketch looked a bit like this:

As you spend more time in your new plot you’ll get to know where the sun rises and sets relative to your garden, and from which direction the weather and prevailing wind blows. Incorporate this information into your sketch, because it will remind you which are the sheltered parts of the garden and which get most sun – all useful information when it comes to plant selection.

Another useful piece of information is soil type. You can do things to alter your soil, but if you know what you’ve got to start with, you won’t waste time and money trying to grow acid-loving plants in alkaline soil without making the necessary adaptations first!

So, how do you find out more about your soil? Well, you should check the soil in several different parts of your plot because the soil may be different in different areas. When I was getting to know my garden I chose 4 different parts of the garden, and took the following steps in each area:

1. Test the Soil Properties: I took a handful of soil, moistened it and observed whether it would hold together in a ball. It did. This indicated that my soil was not sandy. I then poked the ball of soil lightly. Soil from some areas crumbled, indicating that it was loamy, but soil from other areas crumbled less and held it’s shape better, indicating that it had a higher clay content.

2. Checking the pH: I used a shop-bought pH testing kit and followed the instructions to check the soil in various areas. In some areas the pH was 7.5 while in others it was pH8.

3. Finding out the Nutrient value: I dug test-pits 1 foot deep and 6 inches wide in various points of the garden. I removed the soil from the pit and sifted through it on a piece of cardboard. The earthworm count (which indicates the nutrient value) across the garden as a whole averaged 12 worms. In the upper levels of the garden there were fewer worms and the soil tended to be of a more clay-like consistency.

4. Checking Drainage: Filling my previously-dug test-pits with water, I timed how long it took the water to drain away. In the upper sections of the garden the pits drained completely in less than 3 minutes. In the lower sections of the garden the pits took longer to drain, in some cases just over 4 minutes. This indicated that the drainage was poor in these areas.

So, lets recap:

• You’ve sketched the bare-bones of your garden, including features you can’t change and features you want to keep.

• You know which direction your garden faces, which areas are more shaded and which are in full sun. You know roughly what time the sun completely leaves the plot at various times of year and which parts of the garden are battered by stormy weather.

• You know what type of soil you have in different areas.

Now what? Well, now you decide what to do with this information! Come back next month to discover my next steps…...