Update!

It's been two months. We forgot to take pictures and update everyone on our progress along the way.

Not too much has happened except that the paving is now complete and the plants have grown quite a bit!!! I spent a solid five days fitting together a puzzle of paving stones. My daily routine was to crank up the radio (OPB), lay out a bunch of stones the sidewalk, then wander around finding the perfect piece, the path would slowly fill in around each bed, then sweep the gravel into the cracks, clear all the stones off the sidewalk for the night, and get a big pat on the back from Mike when he comes home from work. I decided to scatter the remaining purple stones kind of like stepping stones in the path.

Now that winter and rains are on their way, I put up cloches (French for bell, since plants were often covered with glass bells to protect them from frost) over the back two beds. Some bent PVC pipes and some plastic sheeting clipped on gives you a cheap greenhouse. Of course, this warms the bed up, but perhaps more importantly in Portland, it keeps the plants dry from the constant winter drizzle.

Planting Time!!!

We didn't want to miss out on the fall plating season, so we ordered some mushroom compost which was (guess what?) piled in the driveway. There is so much dirt there!!! But we mixed the compost into some of our scraped-off topsoil, cleard off some of the driveway, and filled up our beds. Here's Mike planting our fall veggies: broccoli, cabbage, onions, swiss chard, kale, miner's lettuce, corn salad, beets, carrots, radishes, lettuces, and spinach. In a few weeks, we plan on planting our garlic, elephant garlic, and shallots. You may see near the house that we saved some tomatoes, corn and potatoes from the tiller.

Aside from choosing a few special stone pavers, like the one for the entrance, we haven't made much progress in the past two weeks except the beds. I didn't think it would be this much work!!!

Water Feature Progress

I've been busy working on the water feature, but haven't made much progress elsewhere.We needed to slow down to let the design come into focus. We decided on a border of purple bluestone around the pool and have some colorful gravel that ties the blue and purple stone together well.

It's coming together!

Water Feature Frustration

This past week has been frustrating. We had to remove more dirt both to allow enough depth for the gravel base for the paving stone and to fine tune the slope. There's hardly enough room in our driveway for the stone, the dirt, and a narrow path to our kitchen door. I can't stand all that dirt being tracked in, we need to fill up those beds!

While it's nice to see the pathways more clearly defined, we've been searching online and visiting every nursery in the Portland Metro area for a fountain, pond, bubbling rock, bamboo contraption, or overflowing pot. While we still don't know exactly what we want, we decided to go custom and make a diamond-shaped pool that extends above ground. Maybe it will stay as a pool, maybe we'll add a water spitter of some kind, I don't know. But we found some bluestone in brick-sized shapes at a different stone yard that I hope will look good.

Playing in the Dirt

The yard is pretty much graded now, though our driveway is now covered with a gigantic heap of dirt. And our paving stone has been delivered! Best part is that we found some bluestone in a purple color, Mike's favorite!!! That pretty much sold us over crushed gravel, wood chips, or other flagstones.

 

I built all four raised beds in a day, which was pretty satisfying. They are built out of cedar 2x6's screwed to 4x4 posts - no treated lumber here! You can tell that the garden is sloped since the two beds in the back are a little higher, but our trusty level has our beds perfectly plumb.

Mike took charge of plumbing our irrigation system. We used PVC pipe and didn't worry about burying it too far down since the ground rarely freezes and we can easily drain the system since it's on a slope.

Each raised bed and each border bed has a valve so that we can control the watering a little bit. It's too expensive to have separate timers and electric-powered valves. You can also see how we marked out the border beds with stake and string.

We are getting sick of the dirt!

Construction, I mean Destruction Begins!

Earlier this week I tore out the front cement walkway with an electric jack hammer. Not very fun especially since the first one I rented started smoking, but it was easier than using a sledge hammer. Here's our stack of concrete:

 

But the real fun began on the weekend. First we rented a sod cutter to remove the grass, then we rented this gigantic tiller:

We needed to break up our dry soil that's been baking in the July sun, so that it is easier to work in, but also because we need to remove quite a bit of dirt because our front yard needs to be regraded with a slope away from the house. While I wrestled the 800 pound beast, Mike had the not so fun job of removing our now huge foundation plantings and their roots.

Now there's only about a ton of dusty, dry dirt to pile up on the driveway!

Design Ideas

Here's what Mike and I have to work with, a picture from our home when we bought it in 2002. We haven't done very much with the front yard, so it pretty much looks the same except the foundation plantings have filled in quite a bit since then.

I've been working on a design with Mike and came up with a drawing, with lots of notes in the margins...

The top indentation is our porch with one step, the bottom rectangle is our parking strip and above that the sidewalk. I'm thinking of border plantings two to three feet wide, four raised beds, and a water feature in the middle. The red line would be a fence and the green lines are the underground plumbing for the drip irrigation. And all around it are my measurements and calculations. While it is not perfectly symmetrical, it's not hard to see the Western formal garden design!

I've also been searching the internet for inspiration and put together a design collage...

Here you can see all my thoughts for the garden: raised beds, picket fences, an arbor in the front and center (maybe triangular to match our home's peak), bluestone for paving, some sort of water feature and I would like to paint our front door, though I don't know which of these colors I like best. I already know I want to paint our porch pillars brown to match the trim instead of that ugly maroon, so I Photoshop'ed our home.

Anyways, I hope these ideas will guide us!

In the Beginning...

My idea to turn our front yard into a garden really sprang from our frustration that we don't have enough room to grow food. And, since it will be a while before we can afford a farm, it only makes sense to use the land that we have right now. Since our back yard is pretty much maxed out, that leaves the front. Our front yard is almost 1,000 square feet of prime garden space: South-facing and full-sun.

I've been reading a lot of books on history of gardens. In a very brief nutshell, formal Western gardens (not the landscaping movement that began within the past few centuries) are said to be based on the Garden of Eden. According to the Book of Genesis, a river flowed into the garden and split into four. So, Western formal gardens often had a central fountain, pond, or pool with four arms or paths radiating out. This style is most easily traced back to Persia, but could be found all over the Mediterranean and thrived through the dark ages in monasteries, medieval times, and the Renaissance (and the symbolism kept piling on, too). Today, we know it best as a French kitchen garden, or Potager

Here's a picture of a random existing Persian Garden:

And a picture of the archetypal French potager, the gardens at the Château de Villandry:

I like a design with dep roots in history, so I think I'll go with a design with a central water feature, that's symmetrical and has sharply defined borders, and raised beds (which have many advantages, not to mention they've have been used for millenia). The other option I'm considering is a more of a wild cottage garden, less hardscaping and more wandering paths.