DG Seminar 2: Making Your Masterplan

Woohooee! We're on to thread #2, and up for discussion is "Making Your Masterplan". Session #1 was a discussion about site evaluation ( here's the link: http://davesgarden.com/forums/t/603624/ ), now we're moving a bit into the planning stage of the game.

Taking into account all of the information acquired during the site assessment, we now turn our sites toward choosing the right plantings for the job. We've considered light, wind, drainage, traffic patterns, soil composition, etc. For those of you thinking, "Woah, woah, woah, wait - she skipped soil prep!", let me reassure you that I hope to tackle that in thread #3. For now I thought that we could talk about making the masterplan so we could then discuss getting the soil ready for implementing that plan :)
Sound good, Sensei??? ;)

So what do ya'll have to say about this topic? Again, any suggested reading?

Thanks!
Jacci

The soil prep seems to be a big subject these days - many are now saying not to prep a special hole. For the most part I have planted smaller specimens so they can acclimate. Larger specimens are going to have a harder time in less than optimal soil and conditions or else they've required a lot of water to get established. Case in point, I lucked out on a huge Fothergilla Mt Airy that was grown for the Garden Center owner but he changed his mind and put it in the clearance area one fall. The root ball was 100 lbs and it was suckering already in the burlap. I dragged hoses out to that thing 12 months out of the year the first year it was planted, and mulched it with my extra special homemade mix. 18 months later that shrub is beautiful but it did shock right after I planted it. Same thing with 2 15' River Birches I got on sale - OMG they needed water all through the winter even. They really stressed from being planted at an odd time. They look good this spring but I keep a hose out there all the time to keep them watered. I don't think I'd have to baby smaller specimens quite so much, but to keep those big branch systems intact they need water. I have found that if they are mulched even bad soil gets nutrients and starts to attract earthworms and improve the soil structure. So I mulch every tree and shrub that goes in at least for the first year. I use a composted shredded hardwood mulch that I had delivered 3 years ago. Its about the same as mulching with humus.

I was also going to say that if I were making a plan for trees and shrubs - which I am laboring at trying to do also, the first thing I did was watch for 1 year before I planted anything. I thought it was fun to take notes on daybreak and sunset, and took pictures of the shade patterns caused by existing trees with leaves off and on. I also took notes on water drainage because its a real problem in this yard esp in the spring. Once upon a time I was a genueen scientist and taking notes can be fun. Amazing to me how bad my memory is so the notes and photos really helped. One of the outcomes of my doing that was that we thinned out a large number of spindly crowded hardwoods that had grown up in our front yard woods and also cut down dead timber. We have untouched forest around the house so went in there and took out dead wood for safety reasons. I like the way it came out - the forest canopy has expanded to the available light and the remaining trees are much healthier.

The next step in my ( very informal ) Master Plan was finding out what would live in my little microclimate. I searched the net and sent for catalogs, some of which are more informative than books, and compiled a list of trees and shrubs I'd be interested in adding. I like ornamental things but I'm in such a woodsy location they feel out of place. So I thought about what was going to be the driving theme of the whole garden and now I'm trying to make my topline consideration whether the new plant will support wildlife in some way. This has been really hard for me to do because it just doesn't fit into my personality to be such a planner. I'm definitely more of a seat of the pants action oriented decision maker. I get bored with too much planning but I've made some really stupid mistakes with design. Well not so much stupid as haphazard and ugly looking. So I'm learning the value of planning the hard way. Its a developmental step I missed apparently in childhood. I knew I had to change when my mother mistook my nursery bed for a garden and said it looked like a schizophrenic planted it. I do have one sunny border that is mostly just flowering perennials.

Another reason I have come to appreciate using smaller specimens is that its given me a less expensive way to test if a plant is really going to do well in a certain location. I have mature forest all around my house so I don't have a blank slate to work with. For ex. I really like the ornamental Sambucus and managed to kill a couple of $4 rooted cuttings from Bluestone. So, either they didn't like the sites I tried or something else. But at least I wasn't out a bazillion dollars on this trial. On the other hand a Bluestone $4 Heptacodium loves the spot I put it in and grew 12" the first year. I'd feel really good about it except all you T&S-ers blew up heptacodium a few months ago and now I'm not even sure I'm going to like the darn thing. Ditto the Leptodermis which does not live up to the ad hype that accompanies it. Thats probably going to take a hike after this summer if it doesn't shape up and turn into the "blooming machine" it was touted as.

I like to propagate so even though I don't need more plants I often root up branch trimmings to give away, and also have gotten quite a few specimen shrubs this way from other people. I've got pots of blue holly that rooted so fast with a shot of B-1 that they will be ready to set out by next year. I think everybody should have a nursery bed.

Equilibrium - I can symp with your story in Thread #1. I took out a bunch of scrub trees and a huge dead maple to open up the space for the river birches. The area is along a creek bed on one side and a 100 ft bed of hosta and shade plants on the other. Oops. No longer such a shade bed. Some of the big blue hosta are looking a little curly this year already and its only June.

Man this has gotten really long! If you're still with me I'll summarize my ramblings
1) For my site, assessment told me that available light and water drainage were the biggest issues for considering what plants could be added.
2) Wrote a list of plants that could live in my conditions
3) Decided on the 'look' or theme of the overall garden - which drove plant selection.
4) Cleaned up the site by removing dead material and pruning trees and shrubs that didn't have enough light before. Put in several french drains to move water away. Created some raised areas and used soil to direct water flow.
5) Measured some areas exactly and plotted them on graph paper. Other areas it wouldn't make any difference because very little can be added so didn't bother.
6) Started putting in shrubs and small trees.

You'll notice I never drew out a Master Plan. I'd love to and I took a great class on it at Holden Arboretum. Wow what a lot of work to do that measuring just for part of the yard. Maybe after I listen to you'all here I'll go back and do that in my spare time. Ha.

For my property counting and identifying all the trees and shrubs would be a multi-year project but I'd like to do it someday. Things I hadn't seen before included some viburnums, Nyssa sylvatica, ironwood, and some woodland shrubs like actea and some plants. Long term I might get around to tagging those specimens just for my own interest.

I've been at this for a few years and sometimes I miss the forest for the trees -so to speak. Thats why I like digital photos. I have loads of them, from all months of the year where I can see what it really looks like. Its usually pretty surprising what I see on the computer screen vs. what I see when I'm out there working. I find that I have a problem creating Unity - one of the principles of design. I like to collect and that doesn't always create a harmonious look. But it doesn't have to be so - there are plenty of mixed shrub borders and open spaces that are harmonious but this is a challenge for me.

So - lets hear from the rest of you!
Andrea

Since I am an engineer and have all of the tools and software to VERY easily survey and draft my property, that is what I did first. It makes it very easy for me to play around with different design ideas all winter long on CAD at work. Here is a picture from my CAD drawing. Since most people don't have access to this stuff I would say use graph paper and make a bunch of copies. You can start with your plat of survey for the overall dimensions of your yard then use a long tape measure to measure out the existing trees/shrubs and structures.

The resolution is much better on CAD that what you are looking at.

Bill

I just offered a community education class on this stuff at Rogue CC in Medford, Oregon.

There is so much to this design stuff.

One of the first steps was utility line locating.

It's amazing how much time can be wasted in the design of certain yards, if the plan is complete, and a major feature or gazebo is planned to be right where an electric easement or gas line is located.

It's not common for utility lines or easements to present big headaches, but it's not rare either.

Summary of plan:
2005

1. Fire break - done
2. Start wind break - done
3. Fence back yard - done
4. Cover crop future pasture - sort of done

2006
1. Upkeep fire break - done
2. Add to wind break - in progress
3. Water & electricity - main areas done; rest in progress - may roll over to 2007
4. "Bones" - orchard & shade trees - done
5. Understory - started
6. A few experiments for entertainment - in progress
7. Lawns
8. Build chicken coop
9. Fence in garden/orchard area
10. Continue to cover crop future pasture

2007
1. Upkeep fire break
2. Add to wind break
3. Begin cottage garden in back yard
4. Acquire small flock of hens
5. Build goat shed
6. Fence future pasture and seed to pasture grasses and clovers
7. Add pasture shade trees and put fencing around them to protect them

2008
1. Upkeep fire break
2. Add to wind break
3. Acquire goats

Some highlights and comments:

We bought this property a year ago, knowing it would be one heck of a challenging environment. It is in the High Desert.
Main issues are
1. desiccating winds (often gusting to 40 MPH, with 50 MPH not unheard of)
2. pure sand (at least 5 ft down - this used to be an ancient lake bed)
3. alkali water and alkali sand.
According to climate (zone 6b), we can grown almost anything here if we water it and give it some real dirt of some sort... The sand was/is mostly covered in tumble weed, sage brush, dessert marigold and winter fat.

Our current sport is killing scorpions and feeding them to the ants and catching grasshoppers and feeding it to my (pet) tarantula. ... I want an English Cottage garden. Not the optimal place for it, I know. I also want a pine forest. This seems more reasonable.

I also took photos and measurements of sun/shade. I made a very primitive map of the house and metal building (there isn't anything else except the telephone pole to cast a shadow around here) and photo copied it. I mapped my sun/shade through out the day at about 1/2 to 1 hour intervals at 5 different times during the year. I now have a kind of "flip book" of sun/shade kept in my garden reference binder. In addition, I am in the process of making a "wind" map to show which way the wind blows during different times of the day and year.

DH and I are at odds as to what to do with the property. He "just wants a lot of green" (good thing we have a good well) and will see things at Home Depot and buy it just because. The nearest HD is 60 miles away, and the climate in Reno is definitely different than where we are. Needless to say, we kill a lot of innocent plants.

The very first thing we did was to put in a 5 ft wide fire break around the perimeter of the property (4.77 acres).

One of the first things to go in, plant wise, were wind break trees. They will take a few more years before they are really useful, but in the mean time, they are sucking up water. We are using a combination of black Austrian pines and leyland cypress (we may use less cypress as we've discovered scorpions will climb them, but don't seem to climb the pines).

Another major thing to go in was running PVC pipe for water & electrical conduit everywhere we could possibly think of (we had access to a trencher, but for a limited amount of time - as a result, if we even thought there was a possibility that we would need water and or electricity somewhere, we trenched for it). We haven't finished laying all the pvc pipe, but the trenches are all in.

Main "bones" trees were next - my "orchard" of 2 apple trees, a peach and a nectarine, and also a "rescue" apple tree from a construction site - and then shade trees. Autumn blaze maple, a weeping cherry (which is not looking good) and a few other maples. One autumn blaze is about 15 feet in front of the house. The others are in the back yard, also about 15 ft apart. I travel a lot with my job, and it is difficult to enforce good tree spacing when I'm not there. I imagine that at least one maple will have to be cut down in the coming years. And a sweet gum, also will probably have to be thinned out in the coming years (an impulse buy that seems to be working out, other than the 3 of them are planted barely 10 ft apart... I cannot seem to convince DH that the spacing on the tag is the correct spacing, even if the trees look "lonely" that far apart!)

Although we cleared some of the brush from the front of the property, scorpions not withstanding, we have left most of the brush in place - mostly to keep the sand from blowing all over creation. If you lost it and it is lighter than a car, it is most likely plastered to the fence along the eastern border.

Numbering the trees and putting them in a database has helped keep track of things. I include location, what I'm feeding it & frequency, what type of 'dirt' was added to the planting hole, etc. I keep saying I'm going to draw a map - especially now that the tree count is getting up over 20, but I haven't yet. It's on my winter 06 "to do" list. I wish I had so many trees that I couldn't count them, but for various reasons, we moved to Nevada instead of Tennessee.

We are now working on "understory" plants - I have a few butterfly bushes that may make it, although they are probably not going to attain their reputed 8 ft tall at the rate they are growing. I am also experimenting to see if Morning Glories will survive the wind - I have about 1800 linear feet of chain link fencing, so I figured I'd play with about 50 ft and see how it goes. They love the heat out here, and I've got a soaker hose on them, but they are not yet tall enough to see how wind resistant they are on the fence.

Plan & unity are definitely a challenge, here, too. Vaguely, we start off with a mountain forest windbreak in the south, an eventual lawn with a few shade trees in front of the house, a cottage garden and small lawn with too many shade trees in the back yard to the north of the house, a small "farm" with orchard and raised beds and livestock area behind the back yard, and about 3 acres of desert behind that. It will take a while to accomplish all of this, but the journey is the fun part.

By the way, keeping a journal and taking lots of photos has been indispensable, even though my journal barely spans a year right now. I would invest in a cheap digital camera if at all possible.

(Can you tell that I am also from the "rambling" camp?)

This message was edited Jun 12, 2006 3:35 AM

Well, Andrea and KMom, I feel like the poor old public speaker who has to follow William Jennings Bryant, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton!

A couple of comments:

1. Always consider the head start you will have if you can incorporate existing trees into your design, even if only temporarily while other things are becoming established. (For KMom, definitely incorporate that telephone pole!)

2. Plan a new landscape like a starter home, with flexibility for change and expansion as your needs and tastes evolve.

3. Usage patterns, personal interests, and utility locations are critical elements that should dictate the design.

4. Phasing is an important consideration, in terms of budget, what to install in what sequence, and the changes to be anticipated with tree and shrub growth.

Guy S.

kmom, why don't you get the goats first, then they can maintain the fire break for ya :)

I would think it was important to know what trees and shrubs grow well in the existing soil. Here is a book written by the late great J.C. Raulston. He advocates not amending the soil, so that interface problem is eliminated.

http://shop.bbg.org/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=BGGS&Product_Code=BBG-PLA-141&Category_Code=BBG-PLA

Will trees grow in pure sand? Litterally less than 1 % organic material in these here parts... on the other hand, I could probably grow 100 different sages instead. But I am a contrary sort of person. More fun to see if the maples of the rich, deep soils of the north east will thrive in the sands of the High Desert. One does accept the fact that one is battling Mother Nature (and in the end, She always wins), and does, therefore, accept a certain amount of failure. Based purely on Mother Nature and the nature of the High Desert, I am sure that many of you (myself included!) see that my plan is flawed from it's very roots. But no matter, we move forward and enjoy every bit of green and shade that we can wrest ;-)

Guy - LOL- you read my mind - Trying to grow morning glories up the telephone pole as I type! I mean, it's vertical and can cast shade, therefore, it should be covered in green, too!

W McK - I like the idea of goats now - and you get the added benefit of goat berries for the garden... now to convince DH...

(BTW, W McK, I am a semi-geek, and after seeing your lovely CAD drawings, I think I may just have to acquire a program. The data base is indespensible, but I am just imagining the power of data base, CAD maps/plans, phots and a journal. And then take those things across years - can you imagine if Thomas Jefferson had such tools as these? I know he had the hand-written versions, but I can only imagine that his hand-written notes, lists and drawings just touched the surface of his collections and experiments!)

Very interested to hear other people's plans. Keeps the old brain cells firing :-)

Take care & many blessings. Karla

Am I being called a geek? I think that is 2 active threads (Math Question) now where my name and geek are in the same sentence. Huh. My wife likes to show people that drawing cause she thinks it is interesting, but at the same time it gives her an opportunity to show the much repressed geek in me. You can probably download a free very basic CAD program if you just want to make a base map to draw on top of.

Thomas Jefferson would probably be surfing the web, and not always for learning, if ya know what I mean.