What we’re planning and planting
I’m working with Carmen Johnson and Bespoke Garden Plans to redo my garden area and exterior landscaping and I am ecstatic! I originally started following Carmen when I was looking for ground cover to plant at our old house and someone shared her video with me. She is so incredibly knowledgeable with all things gardening and landscaping. When I saw her advertising that her company, Bespoke, was offering e-design, I absolutely pounced at the chance.
If you’re a free subscriber & don’t want to become a paid subscriber then don’t worry – I will do a recap on the blog as we finish each area. Substack is just where I’m going to walk through the process in real time for those that are interested in tagging along!
I think the great thing about Bespoke is that they can do just a garden area, the front of your house, or a whole yard design. They don’t only specialize in gardens or back patios, and you really can use them as much or as little as you need. If you’re interested in chatting with them you can inquire online here. I do want to disclose that I am partnering with them over the course of this project and will be documenting, sharing everything and creating a lot of content for their brand and in turn have received a discounted rate. However, if you’re interested in what your project would cost all you have to do is fill out the form and they will email you. Since it’s design services and not a physical item or install, the cost really comes down to how much time their team spends on it which depends on the size of the area that you need transformed.
The Inspiration
If you want to see everything I’m saving down as we plan this area then you can do so easily on this Pinterest board. If that’s overwhelming this reel should give you a 30,000 foot view. I’ll be sharing the layout, the plants, and the potting shed we’re doing in the garden area next week!
The Plan
We have four major areas we want to update on our property and I will break them down into phases below.
Phase 1) The Garden Area
This area includes a garden with raised boxes, a cutting garden, a potting shed as well as tying all of that in with pavers to our existing sheep pin and chicken coop areas.
Phase 2) The Meadows
This is what I’m calling the transition from our yard to our tree-line. We cleared a ton of trees and want to grow fields where they were. The fields will be the middle ground between the woods and our back yard, front yard and driveway. We want to achieve natural borders here and make everything look like this is the way the property was made and not where it’s broken up into driveway, line of landscaping, pasture, woods.
Phase 3) The English Border Garden
If you saw our last back yard then you know that I love a stacked up landscaping situation. We have a really great border along the fence of our backyard and I’m going to play a little game called how many plants can we shove in there. We will hire a landscaper to plant the big items like trees, shrubs, etc but the peonies, lavender, and flowers I will be handling… and most likely attempting to grow from seed.
Phase 4) The Barn
We are in need of a guest room and storage for all of Zach’s tools and equipment and just some flex space for our family (an office for me, a workout room, and MAJOR storage as our house doesn’t even have a linen or a coat closet currently). We will be working with Bespoke to do some simply landscaping around the front of that building and a pathway that ties it back into the house since it will sit off in the back of our yard.
Phase 5) The Patio / Outdoor Entertaining
This phase isn’t in the 4 phase plan because if I’m being honest it might happen in the year 2030 and it just feels wrong to lead you all on like that. At our first home we had a great little backyard patio with a fireplace and built-in grill and we would love to do something like that here. If you follow me on instagram then you know how much I am absolutely yearning for a pool but to be honest, I have sticker shock because they are so. dang. expensive. So time will tell if and when phase 5 comes to fruition.
Up Next
Next week I will be breaking down the garden area because it’s complete and we’re about to break ground (Lord and weather and scheduling willing). I’ll share the inspiration for our potting shed, what plants I have sourced, all the details on the garden boxes we’re making and more!
