My Garden Plans

I’m starting a new garden at a new house and I’m excited to share the entire process with you!

hi my name is Rissa and this channel is about a sprout I am an artist and I have a lot of experience creating different artworks creating art in different ways and one of those passions is gardening my interest in gardening goes way back my mom got the gardening bug when I was probably about 3 years old and after that she doesn’t do anything small we had about I would say an acre of land and quickly that became an entire garden and from that age on I was out in the garden learning from my mom her mom was a big Gardener as well big into vegetable gardening and flower gardening as well so it’s kind of passed on to me my two other siblings aren’t as interested so my mom has really funneled all that attention and knowledge into me and now um I’ve had experience with gardening I’ve been able to do that in the rentals that I’ve lived in in small amounts with either container gardening raised gardening or uh sneakily planting things when my landlord didn’t notice and now I finally have a place of my own a space of my own that I can really create the garden of my dreams and excitingly just this year after years of renting my boyfriend and I were able to buy a house and we’re very excited about the space we have when we were looking for a house Garden space was super important and we loved this house so much and the backyard is going to be completely designated As Dog Zone we have two dogs that we love very much and we don’t want to take any space away from them but the front yard is still plenty of space for me to get to explore my creative ideas for gardening and I’m very excited to see what I can do with it I have many many thoughts and a good amount of space and over the next I would guess a couple of years we’re going to create this into exactly what I have envisioned okay so this is what we’re working with isn’t she cute I love her so much this is our first home um the inside is stylized exactly what we were looking for we really wanted a midcentury style home kind of difficult to come by in our price range in our area when we stumbled upon this house we immediately fell in love with it but it doesn’t quite match that same style on the outside it’s a little bit boring so I’m excited to bring our flare to it to bring the space together with the garden as well as my vision for the interior so that it all kind of drives better right now it’s looking a little bit too nautical a little bit too oldfashioned and that’s not really what I’m into I want it to be a little bit more Enchanted a little bit more Whimsical a little bit more not stand itish necessarily but I want it to have a different vibe than what it is now okay let’s go to my tablet and I’ll talk about the specifics of the space okay so the picture doesn’t do the space Justice it’s actually quite a good amount of space I’m really happy to have all this area to work with especially now that we took out this tree that was right over here it was kind of a sad moment but it was an ash and it did have bores so it did have to go and the cool thing about that is now we have a full Sunny space that I can utilize so the sides here are 30 ft all the way to our sidewalk in our town we are not allowed to do anything with the embankment next to the road so this is really the space I’m working with so it is 30 ft by 21 ft on both sections so I have both of these sections to work with and I’m going to utilize them fully uh as much stuff as I can cram into these two spaces while still making it look pretty I am going to uh we have a lovely little sidewalk that’s about 3T wide um I love that it brings you right into the house it feels very welcoming so I do want to play with that a little bit to bring people’s eye in towards the house so it doesn’t feel like such a jungle that you can’t even see the house that’s going to be a really important sight line for me and I’m going to be breaking up the yard into phases just for you know U monetary reasons and also time to make sure that we can give each section its attention so for this year we’re really focusing on the first 17 ft from the edge of the house out into the yard on both sides that’s going to be my focus that’s where where eventually I’m going to have a little walking path going through that connects with my sidewalk and goes out to my driveway and back to my vegetable garden where I’m going to be planting a bunch of veggies and fruit I’ll talk about that in a future video um coming up so look forward to that and because of the scale of this project uh we’ll have to think of it in terms of phases so I’m really only focusing on this back area for this year and then in the future I’ll be able to move on to the front of the beds just for time and giving each area its own attention the space we’re going to be working in is in Wisconsin zone 5B um which means we have all four season which is great I love autumn it is well obviously I mean I’m a 30-year-old Millennial woman of course I love autumn uh my favorite season so I’m very glad that we get a true Autumn here but we also get brutal Winters that last way longer than they should but that creates another challenge for me to create a garden that is beautiful all year round so that is something I’m excited to try to conquer as well uh Wisconsin is a beautiful state we have tons of water and we are lucky enough to be close to water this does create its own challenges we are in our own microclimate so the lake effect creates crazy storms a lot of wind we have consistent wind almost every day and it brings in a lot of different weather patterns that even like 10 m away from us it doesn’t happen that way so it’s a another challenge that I’ll have to figure out I’ve never had to deal with this before in gardens in the past so that’ll be interesting and hopefully something I can figure out pretty easily and our sun situation we have a west facing space that is where all this Garden is going to take place we get a lot of sun from the south and the west and we get about 7 and 1 half hours now that that tree is removed so that should be plenty to do enough all the sun plants that I have interest in and our roof does go over into the yard a little bit so I do have room for shade plants as well which is nice I didn’t want to fully give up the chance to have shade plants I do love those as well so hoping for a lot of color hoping for an abundance of plants and that will be our next steps all right even though I am very excited about the space and I love it so much to be realistic there are going to be some difficulties that I’m going to have to work with one of them being in this area we have heavy heavy clay soil and I’m going to have to figure out how to plant and thrive in that add amendments it’s stuff I’ve grown in before so I can do it it’s just I not ideal um when starting such a huge Garden the other things that I’m going to be dealing with are Wildlife like earwigs my Nemesis I despise them there are so many in the soil that I’m working with and I am ready to face that war with them the other one that I’m facing in this location is the lovely rabbit we have many rabbits around here and unfortunately they are too cute for me to wish real harm upon but I do want them out of my garden so I’m going to have to figure out both spray options maybe maybe fence options I’m also picking plants that I know they don’t generally like to eat but it’s all going to be kind of a guess and check thing and unfort I’m already resigned to the fact that I am going to lose some soldiers out there but hopefully in the end I can figure out how to make this place beautiful even with the floppy eared Foe and the disgusting little bugs that like to crawl in my soil also unfortunately the space isn’t completely blank and ready to start and just go there are some existing plants and structures that I am going to have to remove in order to capture what I’m going for I’m going to go back to my tablet to explain more about that though all right so for some of the existing stuff that we’re still dealing with um one of the things is the obvious existing plants that we’ve got going on they are in poor shape and are overgrown and are going to be a challenge I am sure to get out of there so those exist and then underneath these is both PE gravel lovely pea gravel and I think I am not for sure but I’m pretty sure this entire garden bed also has landscaping fabric underneath it which is just going to be awesome because if you know anything about clay soil if you put it put fabric on top of clay soil for who knows how many years it is going to be heavily compacted and I do want to plant in that area so I have a feeling that is going to be a little bit of a struggle for the start of this space um I do have some larger some larger things that I’m going to keep in the corner so because this is the first space space in a while I’ve had free reain on I had so many ideas and so many places I wanted to take this space and I really had to take time to re in those ideas and find the true vibe that I was going for which means that I was on Pinterest for many many hours trying to figure out what is this space going to be what do I want it to look like and what do I want it to give off in terms of vibe or I don’t know like the kind of feeling it gives people so we’re going to have to go back to the tablet so I can show you where I started all right so like most things that I am trying to create I start at Pinterest because I find it such a good place to go to see a bunch of ideas of what’s already been out there and try to hand select what I am envisioning so you can see it’s a little bit all over the place with these initial pins that I found when I was thinking of what this space could be in the dead of winter when all I wanted was color so you can see that the main theme here is just like an abundance of color rius colors flowers everywhere not a lot it’s very hodg PCH it doesn’t have a lot of like organization I like color I like a variety of plants I want there to be interest everywhere again I’m working in a confined space so I want to try to get out all of these ideas as much as possible into the space cuz I don’t have many other options for some of these ideas so you can really see that I’m leaning towards abundance I’m leaning towards pinks and purples and greens and yellows those are usually the kinds of things that I love I’m also really into the cottage Vibe although as I progressed through this creative process I realized that I’m a little bit too type A to have it be completely hodge podge I needed to have some bone structure so as I was picking apart the things that I loved in each of these I noticed that they all seem to have some sort of structure within the picture that makes them make sense and I realized that I was going to need to do something like that with my space and not just plant all the plants that I’ve dreamed of they need to have some sort of design they need to have some sort of organization all right and through looking at these pictures along with the structure I also realized that I really love Moody spaces which is kind of the of my house the interior so it makes sense to try and bring some of that on the exterior as well so bringing in some Whimsical um different statuary or maybe bringing in some sort of um black plants that’s what I’m thinking I want to add I can see adding in some different statues that are a little bit more Whimsical a little bit more Fairy like I would like to add darker plants like black plants and dark purples and things with darker foliage and maybe some different artistic details that are a little bit odd but I don’t know I just am really feeling like I’m going to take my space in that direction as well especially since I love anything kind of spooky anything a little bit Halloween and if I can bring that into my space year round that would make me a very happy person and from there all those ideas culminated into my true dream board and I am a person who loves to have the tradition dream board where it is physical it just helps me plan out my space so much better I do love Pinterest but having the old school just feels right so I took all of those ideas and brought them together to create what I see for my space so again we have elements of structures so fencing will probably need to happen uh different sculptures will need to happen to bring that weight to the space so it doesn’t look so free flowing I don’t think I can go with that without some sort of hedging or fencing to pull that space together the colors of interest for me again are the greens the blacks the yellows pinks purples that sort of vibe I’m going to bring into the entire space I also went through and picked the plants that I love and the plants that will hopefully withstand some of our lovely floppy eared foes and also have different textures texture is so important in design and with my creative background I just I need to have almost like a palette to pull from with these plants of textures and colors and different sizes and shapes all of that’s going to be really important to capture this composition that I’m going for um so bringing that all together I feel like I finally have a plan for this space and I finally have a vision for where this is going to go so now that I’ve picked and chosen all the photos that went onto my dream board and I had a really good idea of what was going to go into my space I had to figure out how to put it in my space so I created a blueprint to scale of the exact space that I’m going to be working in and we’re going to go to my iPad and I’ll talk to you a little bit more about that so this is an overhead blueprint of what the space looks like I tried my best to keep it the size that we are actually working with so I could get a really good idea of the plants I wanted to incorporate along with some of the the bone structure that I was talking about and also visualize what is truly feasible this year and what’s going to have to be done next year um for various reasons so looking at this space I knew that I wanted to work in the back part of the yard first so I was thinking what do I want to focus on this year what plants need to go in to start to make this space come alive and I came to the conclusion that this year it’s going to be really important for me to get the bone structure sorted so that means that I’m going to have to get my fencing figured out and I’m going to have to get my borders figured out so I decided that I was going to create a picket fence along all three sides of this garden with the house being the backer and then I wanted to create a brick border because I don’t like when Gardens look a little bit messy or go too far into the sidewalk and don’t look what like they’re um fully orderly I like it have a little bit more clean lines so I’ll be creating a border of bricks to hold in my garden so that it does look organized and clean but still has that overabundance feel so that it I can have both worlds for that I’ll also be working to create this pathway that’s going to cut through the garden um with clay soil you don’t really want to walk on it a ton but I want to be able to be part of my garden so I thought of this cross-sectioning walk that will help make me be able to immerse in my garden a little bit bit better so that’s going to happen this year and then of course I have the sidewalk that is already existing that will lead us to the front door and create more structure and break up my space better um as you can see I am very planned out at this moment I have everything placed pretty close to where I want it there is always going to be changes as I’m laying out plants and seeing them truly in real life if I would like to keep them there but the main idea is that towards the back of the house I want to have some structure plants that have more of an evergreen interest or have interest that is really large and impressive because I want the eye to be drawn back to the house and not for the house to be shrouded so in this area that’s where my taller plants are going to be some of the more statement pieces are going to be so I have things like roses and hydrangeas and Hol Hawks to bring the eye backwards then the idea is as I move to the second like level it’s going to level down in sizing but also it’s going to become more full of plants there’s going to be smaller plants that are medium height to bring you stair stepping down towards the pathway and then finally as you get towards the pathway because I want the path to feel not like it’s overgrown or hard to walk through I’m going to have a lot of ground covers and shorter plants so that you can clearly see the cobblestones and all of that that’s going to be in that area and makes your eye go from low level all the way up to the higher level of the space and bring your eye to the house cuz ultimately I would love for people who are coming to my house and visiting to walk down this main path here go right to the door and see this lovely cascading color and texture and design and hopefully make it feel more welcoming so when I was designing these exterior borders it is really important to create that order but I also don’t want it to feel too stale and like there’s not much going on there so I also set back my fence so that I can have an area to plant in in this next to the driveway next to the sidewalk and next to the lawn on the other side that will eventually lead to my veggie garden and with those areas I’m going to plant them with shorter uh annuals probably to bring a ton of color so that they’re exciting but also because we have really harsh weather I can’t have anything that’s too um precious and can’t have a lot of perennials there cuz there is salt that we’ll like to collect in those areas so it’s better to have annuals that I can pull out each year and not have to worry about bringing them back each year behind the fence I will also have some lower hedging and bushes and flowers to create that Whimsy over the fence like you’re peeking into Over the Garden Wall into to this mystical magical place and hopefully that will bring the space together especially since right here this blank space that’s phase two and that won’t happen till next year so I do have to keep some green space keep some grass there for this year and I want it to still feel like it’s encompassed in the space and not a forgotten spot so this border is going to help bring that together the last thing that we’ll have to wait until next year which I’m sad about but that is okay I will save up money and get exactly the thing I want is the Arbors that will be flanking each entrance to the garden and it’ll be beautiful and awesome but for now they’ll just be open areas that you can walk through okay so what’s next the plan for this year is constructed into about five basic steps and those are cleaning up the space and prepping it getting it ready for the start planting obviously adding some structure so that bone structure I was talking about and then any final things we want to do before the summer season is up and then finally transitioning the space for our season changes so we’ll be starting those very soon so stay tuned for the next video where we prepare the space and if you would like to please subscribe so you don’t miss out on any of those videos and I’ll see you in the next one goodbye