VEGETABLE GARDEN PLANS
Vegetable garden plans are finally underway! I’m going to be referring to it as a vegetable garden, but it will have all sorts of plants. It is a newly fenced-in area on the Southwest side of my house. You can see how the space was used in 2020 but we fenced in the area in December. It is roughly an 18’ x 12’ space and it gets decent direct afternoon light in the summer.
It’s a complete mess out there now because we installed the fence and then it snowed for 2 months straight, but it’ll be beautiful in no time.
The AC unit is the biggest “obstacle” when determining raised bed placement and the slope of the land also shifted around some of the original plans, but I think it will allow us to do some interesting terraced-style raised beds. The doors are offset to allow for more room for the raised beds closest to the house where the sun is the best. The doorways are 4ft wide but we will most likely only have a 3ft wide gravel walkway through the garden.
Now time to get to designing! Materials I used: graph paper, tracing paper, painter’s tape, Micron pens, architect’s ruler, cat.
I had a rough sketch of the veggie garden that I made a few months ago. Today I went outside and took actual measurements now that the fence is installed and it’s not a muddy mess out there. The left side of the garden (along the side of the house) is about 1 foot longer than the 18ft side on the right. Since this is the first time I’ve done a more technical drawing like this, I initially adjusted for the non-squareness of the space (which is definitely a technical term) by adjusting the left side/house angles, but I quickly realized that probably wasn’t accurate, seen in picture 3 in the slideshow below. I redrew it in picture 4 below with the house angles remaining at 90 degrees and adjusted the 3 other sides of the perimeter to account for the non-squareness.
Once I had the structural elements finished, including the AC unit and 3ft wide pathway placement, I went into drawing two different raised bed configurations. I wanted at least 18in of clearance around the AC unit and eventually came up with a plan to have two L-shaped raised beds that are 3ft wide, shown in the 2nd slide below. The upper L-shaped bed, closest to the AC unit, will most likely be terraced a bit higher than the lower L-shaped bed. When we get those extremely heavy summer downpours, this side of the house is where most of the backyard patio water runs to the front of the house so I want to keep the slope fairly consistent with the natural slope of the land.
I also have a 2ft wide walkway to access the lower raised bed, which probably isn’t as ideal as 3ft wide but I wanted to maximize planting space. The current plan is for the raised beds to be made from cedar and to be 18” deep.
The remaining space in the garden will be used for flowers, maybe some small shrubs, vining flowers climbing up a yet-to-be-purchased trellis near the AC unit, and maybe some planters thrown in here and there! The left side (house side) of the garden gets more light than the right side, so I want to trial some annual flowers on the right this year knowing they might have to transition more shade-loving plants in future years.
Overall I’m very excited to begin using this space this year. The fence is 6ft tall which deer can technically jump over, but I’m hoping the proximity to the house and the fact that they generally don’t venture over to this side of the house will deter them. I love that the garden fence is low profile and completely see-through, and some neighbors have already expressed interest in our new garden plans!