~ Recycled Landscaping ~

Step 3: The Interior

Draw some paper plans of how you want the garden to look when finished and use them as your guide. A garden hose helps to show you how to shape and space your garden elements. You can't stick to the plans too rigidly on a project like this because you never know what you might find in the ground or exactly how a wall might fall etc. Nature tells you how the garden will ultimately look, you can't force it overly much.

Keeping in mind that different heights make an interesting landscape, we used some large rocks we had left over from a retaining wall project and they made excellent stair steps and benches inside the garden.

Your tractor is your friend on this type of job, but make sure you work safely and never put anything you can't afford to lose under a suspended one ton rock, including toes, tools and old pet dogs that don't move too quickly anymore!


Now get a few loads of drainage stone and stone screenings to use as walkways and decoration around your rocks. Put lots of landscape fabric under the walkways and screenings to prevent weeds from coming through.

Build a section at a time and work in some proportionately sized flower beds as you go. Not too many or you will lose the Zen-garden look. There are lots of rules around how to correctly build Japanese karesansui gardens if you are a purest, we followed some of them but mainly we just wanted something to look clean and well proportioned.

The flower beds were excavated to about 3' deep and refilled with top soil and compost we made ourselves. Almost all the plants we used came from our other gardens, we did buy some of the trees from a local nursery and traded some vines with our neighbours.

Comments

[sweetpeapete]

Your work is commendable. I sure did like the look of your barn, though. Although a photo doesn't always show the detail of an actual eyeball perusal, I sure wish I had such a barn on my little 5 acres! I think about the incredible studio I could have built using much of the existing barn structure. To each his/her own, I guess? Best of luck in life. Happy Trails. Pete in the Minnesota woods.

[eltigre]

Yes, we were sad to have to take it down, but the price estimates we got to rebuild it were over 300,000. Yikes...

[sweetpeapete]

Hi, you need not answer this as I know we are all busy, but I was just wondering where you live? (Just the state). It looks beautiful. I am, as I indicated, in east central Minnesota. My woods are mostly Red Oak, Birch, scattered Evergreens, and some Popple, Ash, etc. The trees are sorta close together, but walking around is unhindered by scrub. It's quite pretty and quiet. Happy Trails, Pete

[eltigre]

We live in Southern Canada. We too have mostly maple on the grounds, but also some really nice Spruce, pine, walnut and oak as well. Very nice colours in the fall, the maples sure know what they are doing.