Garden Projects We're Looking Forward To

Maybe it’s the fact that some aspects of life have felt completely on hold during this spring and summer season because of Covid-19, or maybe it’s because we’re getting so close to baby boy’s due date that my focus has largely turned forward. 2020 has felt like an incubation season, a time for things to grow in secret and plans and dreams to slowly mature below the surface. We often say that the longer we let an idea sit, the better it gets. If we had enough resources to act immediately on every dream we’ve ever had, we would miss out on the better versions of those same ideas, forced to slowly ripen over time. Patience! It’s one of the hardest lessons of the garden - one that is offered up on repeat, season after season, because I’m not sure we ever truly master it.

So. Here are a few future projects that we’ve been dreaming and scheming about lately. Some of them are not too far off on the horizon and others definitely won’t happen for another several years down the road, if we’re still at this house.

ONE | Courtyard Renovation & Potager. Right outside our back door and baby back porch is an area of asphalt that I not-so-lovingly refer to as our very own piece of the surface of Mars. It’s truly dreadful, especially in the summertime where it fairly radiates aggressive heat and causes all living things except for a few pioneering weeds to scurry away to less hostile areas of the garden. So yes, it’s terrible now, but the combination of sun + existing impermeable ground covering + location right outside the back door pose wonderful possibilities for a kitchen potager courtyard with generously-sized raised beds and pea gravel paths. We currently grow a mix of flowers and vegetables in our cutting garden, which works great for some things, but I’ve realized that certain of the vegetables would be happiest with even more pampering than that space allows, and nothing could be a cushier home than a raised bed with perfect soil, perfectly even watering, and perfect drainage. Here are some inspiration photos:

TWO | Pool. The less attainable version of this dream is a plunge pool. I’ve wiled away quite a few pleasant hours ogling beautiful plunge pools in all shapes and settings. The more attainable version of this dream is a stock tank pool, also sometimes called a hillbilly swimming pool.” The last couple of summers we’ve even caved for inflatable pools, because we all have to do whatever it takes to stay cool. That said, we do have certain aesthetic standards and inflatable pools miss the mark by quite a long shot. They also spring a lot of leaks and need to be constantly emptied and refilled, which turns out to be a big pain. More votes in favor of the stock tank pool are the fact that small children cannot accidentally fall in, and we have a perfect corner in the future courtyard space that would be private but look out over the raised beds. Here are some inspiration photos:

THREE | Pavilion/Outdoor Porch. We’ve long wished for a covered outdoor gathering spot. We currently have a porch only just big enough for two rocking chairs and out-buildings that you wouldn’t want to sit in, but if we had a proper porch, we would spent a lot of quality time in it. We also love hosting outdoor dinners and quite a few times have been sent running inside by unexpected showers, plates of food in hand. My brother-in-law Myles, who passed away unexpectedly last fall, was one of the most porch-minded people I’ve ever met. No one could do that porch life - an outdoor sit with a retro playlist and a case of cold beer and a smoke - more happily for more hours on end than he could. While he was alive we talked about how we wished we had a proper porch for him to enjoy when he came to visit, and now that he’s gone we want more than ever to build an outdoor pavilion in his honor. We have it designed already: a simple structure with a steeply gabled roof covered in climbers that calls to you from the end of the path garden straight off the back of the house. It will house a long gathering table, a couple of comfortable chairs or bench swing, and hammocks. Here are some inspiration photos:

FOUR | Greenhouse. There may be no more drool-worthy garden structure than a beautiful greenhouse, and the fancy ones can really run a high bill. But there are also some examples floating around of truly precious DIY versions and even very simple structures that if well-maintained and landscaped around, can still be extremely attractive. I’d like a greenhouse primarily for the function of starting seeds and propagating, but the best spot that we have for one, sun-wise, is so central and visible that it will also need to look great. Here are some inspiration photos:

FIVE | Orchard. One of the first things about our property to intrigue us when we moved here about 6 years ago was a little grove of overgrown fruit trees in a corner of the 3/4 acre lot. The apples and pears were about 30 feet tall, so beyond the silhouette of what we expected in a fruit tree that we didn’t even recognize them at first. (We also didn’t know much about plants back then.) Once we realized what we had, we decided to try to rehab them with a few consecutive seasons of pruning. We’re a bit wiser now, realizing that structural issues aside, the chances of getting any kind of apple or pear harvest in zone 8a in the SC foothills are negligible. We’ve literally never even gotten one that looked normal and edible. Apples and pears need more chilling, and that comes about an hour up the road towards the NC border and higher altitudes. It’s pretty amazing how much difference even a relatively short distance can make for the potential of growing certain plants. Our 6 or so trees live on, but we plan to take them out within the next year and replace them with fruit species that have a much greater hope of success here - namely Asian persimmon, plum, nectarine, and fig. Here are some inspiration photos:

SIX | Front Hedge & New Beds. If you’ve ever read Michael Pollan’s book Second Nature, you can’t forget his discourse on the American lawn and how the construct of cultivating huge swaths of green monoculture in suburban neighborhoods came about as a combination status symbol “we can afford to have this much unproductive space” and a forced democratization of landscape “we must all contribute to the overall effect of one continuous park-like landscape without walls and boundaries.” We currently have a lot of front lawn, and it’s our dearest wish to carve away at it bit by bit until there are only a couple of very purposeful islands left. Not only does it feel wasted to have so much space that doesn’t produce anything, but as a result, we don’t spend almost any time up front and so it doesn’t give us a lot of joy - like a large room of the house that one never even steps foot in because it’s empty and the walls are an unpleasant color. The next steps we plan to take are to plant a blueberry hedge along one side and to plant a low(ish) evergreen hedge along the road. Once those boundaries are a bit more defined, we’ll build planting beds off of them and ultimately start to redeem a lot of what is now simply wasted space. Here are some inspiration photos:

SEVEN | Bees. Our next creatures will be bees! I’m not sure whether to classify them as wildlife or livestock; I supposed they’re an intersection of the two. The more we plant here, the more bees we see happily buzzing about from early spring until frost. We purposefully leave about a third of our “backyard” green space uncut through the first half of summer in order to give the bees plenty of access to clover and anything else that blooms wild. The mild spring and ample rain this year has meant that the clover is still going strong for us in mid-June. When it does start to brown out and die back, we’ll start cutting in that area. In the city, we have close neighbors and we can’t control what they choose to practice regarding pesticide application, so we want to be sure that if we bring bees here, we can give them what they need without having to travel far. The natural bee population that we’ve observed has convinced us that when we set up our own hive(s), we will be able to provide food for them. Here are some inspiration photos:

As we often like to say, “Dreams are free!” Thanks for following along.