Garden planning...

I found a cool free tool...it's very limited and pretty basic, but that's kind of what I want, at least to try. It's http://www.floorplanner.com/. Anyway, I was putzing around on it and decided to try to come up with some ideas, based on a gardening magazine I bought, for the area next to our garage, which currently has grass growing in it (and in some spots dying in it). This is probably an idea for next year, but here's what I came up with. Two ideas...I'm not sold on one over the other, but they're pretty similar anyway...I'll have to visualize it better outside. I used our plat of survey to get the dimensions too, so I'm not entirely sure they're "perfect" dimensions or anything.

Garden idea #1The large line at the bottom is the garage wall. The two lines at the left and top are the six-foot wood privacy fence. The white lines on the right represent a pergola that I would probably build (depending on what I plant over there). The "pond" is really a birdbath (housewarming gift--thanks!) that I'm going to mount on a pedestal that I'm going to make out of the leftover brick laying in piles in parts of the yard that matches the house side brick and will give it a really rustic look. As for the plants, it doesn't matter, because my mind will probably change a hundred times. As you can see in Option #1, everything is bunched to one side...makes for a very clean, simple layout full of flowers and foliage. In this option, I'd probably leave lawn in the white space on the ground, but maybe not.

Garden idea #2

In this option, there's a little more potential for it to be a "refuge," since you can tuck yourself away. I would probably use stones and groundcover in the white space on this one, only because it's more of a weaving path that might be tougher to mow with lawn there. In this one, the thought also is that you could sit on the bench and the birds might still use the birdbath, since it's further away and behind some potentially taller plants. Also, you wouldn't be facing the western sun--it would be at your back, behind the fence. Furthermore, the garden "ends" on the right with the option of someday curving it around to the right and down, around the corner of the garage there (although the hot tub is currently in the way).

Both of these options are probably projects for next year, what with money going into the roof and the windows this year. But, it helps to have a plan, or at least a close idea, of what to do. And this is the best plan I've ever had as far as gardening has gone. Usually, it's just buy something I like and stick it in the ground where I have space.