Garden design help

[GinGeum]

Can I have your thoughts on this rough garden plan? I’ve drawn about a billion drawings so far and this is the latest one. I think it’s got everything I want, but is there anything that wouldn’t work or you think might work better a different way?

The six veg beds aren’t huge (1.5m x 2.7m) but there are only two of us, potatoes are planted elsewhere, and fruit and perennial veg are planted in the back garden. So I think they will be big enough for what we need?

It is NNE facing, but not overlooked, so gets a good amount of sun during the day.

The house is at the bottom of the page, but with a bit of a garden between the front door and start of the plan. The idea was to have something interesting to look at from the house, especially in winter when the veg area may be fairly empty.

If you can’t read my scribbly handwriting, I can let you know what it says

Yes def do. I wanted to do something similar with hedging, white hydrangeas and Portuguese laurel shaped in topiary. Then I remembered I am shit at gardening and struggle to keep pots watered! Good luck, I love your design and think it will be stunning.

I’ve got two squares of lawn in front of the house which I want to make into big borders instead, so I might do the low hedging on those instead. It might work better on a more symmetrical area?!

Charlie how on earth did you manage to use SketchUp?! I couldn’t even draw a line without getting in a muddle. I’ve printed out some graph paper instead

Okay, here’s a to-scale drawing of the plan. I’ve put the box hedging back around the borders, and the stepover apples edging the veg area. Hopefully it’s more of a mix of formal and Cottage garden now it’s not all perfectly symmetrical.

We can’t quite decide what to put down on the path for the veg area. We will do gravel for the path with the seating area in the middle, but do we carry on the gravel or do brick or something else? Might have to decide that when we can actually see it coming together in front of us.

The veg patches are roughly 5x3m (right one is obviously slightly smaller) so we may end up putting extra paths through the centre of them if everything is too hard to reach.

Thanks for all your help. I’ll be back when the structure is made to ask for border plant recommendations I expect

It's terrible, isn't it? Mind you I had months and months before we had the money to do the garden, so I taught myself. Definitely not something you pick up in an hour.

The plan looks really good now. And the veg patches at 3m wide would allow for a 60cm path in between two 1.2m patches. I think a path 50 to 60cm wide is the recommended width for a wheelbarrow. If you don't want that, try and kneel on the floor and measure how much space you'd need to get up comfortably.

I think you can easily reach 60cm from the path when weeding or planting, anything more than that you'd need to try out - it's easy to do at this stage and you could have a tiny path just for stepping on (I've seen planks of wood used for that, but the wood does get slippy when wet and muddy).

On the original plan I had a narrow strip of brick embedded in grass as a wheelbarrow path - I could actually do the same without the grass I suppose, as just something to stand on/wheel wheelbarrow on.

Aah, now that makes sense. Have to have supreme wheelbarrow control to make that work. I wobble all over the shop coz I overload mine and then struggle with it.

Brick in gravel would work. Or brick in bark. I'd probably just do the whole thing in brick, because the hard landscaping that we've got really makes the garden. Plus I'm glad we got rid of our gravel path. We now just have gravel where the brick meets the house for drainage.

DP did suggest doing the whole thing in brick. Maybe we’ll do that. In the back garden I did a few paths of gravel with brick edging, but made the bricks fairly spaced out and planted thyme in between. I love the look of it so I could do something similar to that maybe.

If you want more inspiration have a look at Anna Pavord's little book 'Growing Food' - there are plenty of plans for all sorts of fruit and vegetable plantings in it.