Dealing with a New Garden Site
Gardens always have problems when you first start the design. Not forgetting that we live in a climate of extremes, very cold at times, very hot sometimes and windy as hell when it feels like it. My top tips for starting a garden are, get your soil work sorted, organise your water, the more the better and plant lots of trees and shrubs.
If you are lucky enough to have great views, it’s likely that those views also face the direction of our prevailing winds, making wind breaks difficult to plant without obstructing your view. Or alternatively, your elevation exposes you to the hammering winds we have experienced for the last few years.
There may also be views you want to obstruct, a large house next door, powerlines dominating the landscape or turbines in the too close view.
If you live near water it’s possible that you have problems with mosquitoes. Or your little patch may be a kangaroo highway, with the local fauna nibbling on every new leaf on every new plant in your garden during the morning and afternoon peak hour.
Many folk squirm in their boots at the mere thought of dealing with the 1 metre of thick red clay underneath their garden. Or you may have solid granite rock or pure shale to deal with – jack hammer gardening is my pet hate.
The district we live in has a multitude of challenges when designing a garden, but most of these hiccoughs can help guide you to creating a space that enhances the good things and diminishes the bad.
Many rural gardens in this district have sensational views and screening the view with a windbreak would be insane but so too is putting up with unrelenting winds. So you have to find a way to frame your view – without blocking anything important, whilst providing some wind protection and hopefully not creating a wind tunnel.
Not only does wind and soil dictate the plants you can grow but how much water you have and the type of water. Some of you are lucky to have town water, which although expensive is pretty good for plant establishment and growth.
Rain water is always the best for our gardens but we all know how unreliable that can be. My next best choice is dam water, but again that can have its limitations. So the next best option is bore water and that has the potential to have problems such as too many minerals like calcium and iron. Bore water generally will keep your plants alive but they don’t tend to thrive and grow, and you don’t want to get the water on the foliage of your plants.
Hopefully when selecting the site for a new home you can minimise these problems. My suggestion for most sites is to plant as much as you can as soon as you can. Plants are the slow bit, so get cracking. The more plant established your garden is, the more resilient the rest of your garden becomes.
