Hit the Dirt; Landscape Planning

Hello my name is David Weigel I'm co-host of hit the dirt along with Sally cries no B.S. you've heard the last two weeks. I'll be with you this week and next week and then Sally will be back with her unique perspective. Previously we've been talking about a site plan to give our landscaping efforts direction. This plan we're developing may exist only in the back of our minds or it might be a not to scale sketch of an aerial view for our gardening ambitions. In some cases we might pay a landscape designer to create an exact plan for us. And those cases Good communication is essential to creating a highly personal landscape the first time out. Get more involved with your gardens and they will become more a part of you. Today we're moving toward choosing our landscaping projects for 1095. We've chosen our contours which means we have a drainage player. We know where we want to put our lawns walkways patio walls and steps not necessarily where they are right now. That was a very important point to remember. We have a good idea about our big trees and hedges and we saved a sunny spot with good soil for the vegetable garden. More we play in raised

beds of our soils poor food production is a priority in most families in the air by becomes a basis for all of our gardening efforts. One can truly enjoy growing fresh basil peppers and tomatoes among ornamental plants. And this is sort of a new point I haven't really brought up before the aspect of vegetable gardening within the landscape but it's certainly very important for all of us to think about as we design our properties because certainly we all have to eat. And the idea that we were evolving toward now is picking on plants and choosing where to put our beds in our landscape design. And I argue that we need to do this at the same time decide which plants to use and where to put them. Because if we take the approach of choosing where to place our bad and then making plant choices to follow we could be restricting ourselves. Or if we just decide which plants it is we want to use and then try to figure out where to put them. We run into problems too. So what I suggest is we envision our gardens

with the plants in them as we try to lay them out look around your property see oh some red Barberry would look beautiful there and they would grow there because the soil is dry and there's a lot of sunshine or we can look at a wet spot and think of what a wonderful marsh plants would grow there and add color and harmony to our landscape. So what we have been doing is consulting with our friends who are other gardeners and and looking in books many of them with Sally suggested and working down the list of plants that we can use on our property. And we started from a tremendous list of plants that almost all leaves us in wonder and maybe even kind of confused about all the different possibilities there are for our gardens. So what we have to do is figure out which plants are going to work for us. We have to figure out which plants we need for our food crops and which plants we want to grow. As far as cutting

flowers or what herbs we might like to have for flavorings or medicine. And from that once we decide which plants we really need then we can start thinking about the plants that we want to incorporate in our garden for ornamental purposes. And from here this big list that we're narrowing down of all the possibilities of plantings becomes much smaller. We have to look in the books and see which plants are hardy to zone for five and coastal Maine or even zone three if we're talking about northern Maine. And from there look at the. Form of the players we have to figure out how we're going to arrange our plans to balance the forms in our garden. The balance is very important the I crave the balance in our designs or if we want to use in balance we have to use it to our advantage not having things that look in balanced

and displeasing to the eye and other points to consider our text year. We have to think about the texture elements of our garden and how they contrast with each other and with the surroundings. And the third element to consider is. The collar our use of collars a very important point to consider and deciding on which plants to use and how to arrange them. And that's a point that will have to discuss further next week. As we continue to narrow down our plant list and discuss which things will work on our property and how we can develop a system of a landscape that works for us in our lifestyle. This is Dave Weigel for hit the dirt.