The Dining Room Garden Project

Here's what I want to work on first, gardening-wise.

This is the overall front of the house. I chopped off a little to the left - there's a whole 'nother tree over there, and a little bit of yard. But this portion is sufficient for looking at the potential dining room garden.

You can see the front door, with the porch and it's railing, in that stone-surrounded bit that sticks out in the middle. The entrance to that porch is currently on the right side of the porch, by way of a sidewalk that runs along the front of the house. We want to change that, so the steps come up at the front of the porch, and a stone path winds down and around, just behind the tree, then curves out in front of the lamp post, to the driveway.

Behind the tree where you can't really see it is another door, which is the dining room door - and around that is where I want to put the dining room garden.

Here's a series of closer pictures, the first one shows the tree and the light post, between which the new front path will run; and the dining room door, under the larger awning.

This entire section is basically going to become the dining room garden.



So the dining room garden will eventually cover both patches of dirt to either side of the dining room door, the sidewalk, and across to where that line of the shrubs on the left currently is, over to where the new front path runs. Despite the sidewalk, it'll eventually be all one contiguous gardeny area.

Originally I'd planned to bust up and haul out the sidewalk there, and have solid garden all the way out to the new front path. But then ... remembering my vow to approach all of my home renovation projects frugally, and with as minimal effort as possible to still get what I want, I decided that was going to be too expensive, and too labor intensive, for a basically unnecessary reason.

So Plan B became to leave that sidewalk in place, and do several things. First, we need the sidewalk as far as the steps to the dining room door anyway, as we're still going to use that door for our daily comings and goings. But on past that, I'm going to set up a little table and chairs, a little outside sitting area, right on the concrete walk. Past that, where there no longer really needs to be concrete for any purpose, I'll probably incorporate a section of container garden. I wouldn't mind incorporating some type of water feature out there, and that's also a possibility - find or make an above-ground fountain, and set it on the concrete walkway, surrounded by container plants. That way, it has a stable base.

The only downsides I see to using a lot of container plants on that sidewalk is (a) watering (more about that below), and (b) lack of winter interest, and a bare concrete walkway throughout the winter, unless I figure out something else to do then ... which, with a little thought, I'm sure I can. Hey ... I could use that whole area as a focus for a seasonally themed display, autumn and Halloween in the fall, Christmas decor from Thanksgiving till January, ... hmmm. That has potential. And there are plenty of outdoor electrical outlets in the area, too.

I may also lay brick over the sidewalk ... since the sidewalk's already there, I don't have to worry about digging and putting the right base under the brick to keep them stable through the seasons. Just lay them out, and voila ... instant brick pathway! Yeah, we'll have to take one step up (the height of a brick) from the driveway onto the walk, but that's not such a big deal. We'll also have to find a nice way to make it transition well, but I'm sure I can come up with something.

We're going to have to weigh the options of either moving the former concrete steps, currently on the side of the porch at the end of the concrete sidewalk, around to the front of the porch where we want our new path to be ... or of just leaving them, and building wooden steps at the front. The deciding factor will be which is cheaper, because after doing some research I discovered moving concrete steps ain't easy. Some contractors won't even do it, so we have to see whether we can find someone who will, and whether they'll charge us more than it would cost to build new wooden steps instead.

If they stay here, that's okay ... I'll incorporate them right into the garden. I can set containers on them and have a multi-level plant display, or something like that.

I'm incredibly psyched about all this. This place just has such great potential! I mean, it's already beautiful, but has so much potential to really stand out, and show off its character. I have grand plans, eventually, for the whole front yard. After I complete the dining room garden, I also want to work on the area in front of the big front window (to the left of the front door as you're looking at the picture), and then build beds around the trees and extending out, and eventually linking those together in the middle, in front of the new path to the front door. Eventually I'd like to cover the entire yard from about the midway point on up to the house with flower beds, shrubs and ground cover, and even more eventually extend them partially down into the lower half of the yard, toward the street, at least on the perimeter - for two reasons - first, because it will just look freaking awesome, and second, because I'm all about doing away with as much lawn as I can get away with ... to have less mowing, and to conserve watering. This lawn is really beautiful, because the former owners took care of it ... but it's too nice to let die out in the middle of summer because I can't afford to water it, and after getting our first water bill, I don't see watering a lawn for several months being in our budget.

So ... do away with most of the lawn, and replace it with drought-tolerant ground cover and plants, watered with a soaker hose system run off of rain barrels. I'll come near to eliminating my need for 'purchased water' for this garden if I plan well. That's why I'm cautious about getting too many container plants on that sidewalk ... I don't think the soaker hose concept is going to work for them. Of course, I could always water them with a watering can filled from the rain barrel (assuming we get enough rain for all this), but then we're getting labor intensive, and another of my lofty goals is to have all this beautiful gardeny goodness with minimal maintenance effort.

Yeah. I don't want much.

Another really cool thing about these gardens is, the three front windows - dining room, spare bedroom, and living room on the other side of the front door - are all big windows, out of which you can see really well. The living room window goes almost all the way down to the floor, which gives an awesome view right out into the yard. That means the double fun/challenge of basically building a two-sided garden - one that looks great from the street, and also from indoors, where we'll be able to see it really well from those windows. Which means foregoing the typical from-the-street layout of tall plants in back, medium plants in the middle, and short plants in the front. If I do that, all I'll see out my windows is the flat facade of the back row stuff. So I have to make the garden 3D from two sides. How fun is that!?

But to focus back in on the near future, my first order of business in the dining room garden is to take out the shrubs directly in front of the house (most of which are dead or half-dead anyway), dig up those beds and condition them with some good compost, and plan my plantings. More on that in a future post.