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Mild Winter though it may be, we have reached the point where our fingers are itching for the dirt. The winter months are for seed catalogs and garden dreaming, with a hot cuppa by our side, and our imaginations blocking out the dreary scenes outside our windows. My personal favorite activity in these chilly times is garden planning. For obvious reasons, I don't have a ton of time for a full veggie garden anymore (hello, small business owner!), but I do have a deep desire to get my landscape in some semblance of order. I have lofty goals, but I also know that I am about to be MIA for most of the growing season. For that reason, I've decided to take our oft-given advice to customers and apply it to my own landscape.
"Start small"
Recently we hosted the wonderfully talented landscape designer, Marie Chieppo of EcoPlantPlans, to give us a primer on how to set ourselves up for garden design success. Marie gave through a presentation highlighting the basics of doing a site analysis, and explained that, while our impatient selves typically want to dive in and start digging, a successful garden needs a proper start. Marie explained the need to determine the sun and soil types for a particular area, and advised us to keep in mind surrounding structures that might create micro-climates. After her presentation, we broke into groups and started to work through plans for small spaces in our yards. Obviously we all want to skip to the good stuff, choosing the plants and getting them in the ground, but we also don't want to waste our time and money by installing plants in the wrong places.
A bit ago, I wrote up a (sorta) step-by-step guide to how I was doing my own site analysis, and I wanted to share that with you all as well. Over the next few weeks I'll put out the next steps and by the time Spring rolls around, we should have a garden plan in place!