I decided that other entry was too long so I’m putting the request in a separate entry.  If you haven’t already, go read the entry underneath this with all the pictures and then come back.

So here’s what I need.

Tina is pretty insistent that we do something about this side bed.  In fact, when I came home on Friday she told me that she had been contemplating starting to pull out the cement blocks.  And clearly those need to come out.  But I don’t want to start anything until I have some sort of design for how we want this to look.  And I don’t want to rush into it.  I’m extremely grateful to Tina for all her help and I know she’ll help me implement the plan but I feel like I (with Nik’s advice/approval of course) need to come up with the actual plan.

A.  I definitely want to make the bed wider, although not so wide that it’s not easily weeded/maintained.  The square foot gardening guy says about 2 feet is ideal, any comments?  We don’t really care how much lawn we lose so it could be wider if you thought it would look good/be OK to maintain.

B.  I think I want some sort of curving design rather than just a long straight look.  Feasible?  Look good?  Or other ideas to break up that really long boring line that I have right now?

C.  I need something to make the edge of the bed.  The front bed currently has some nice rocks and I’m tempted to continue that theme.  Do you think this would be too hard to do?

D. I also need a way to make space between the edge of the bed and the lawn so we can actually mow the whole lawn and don’t have to cut the edge by hand.  Again, the front bed has a border of bricks that seems to work OK.  Any better ideas?

E.  Any good design books to recommend?  I feel like I’m shooting in the dark on this one.  I do know that I’d like to have some big herb plants, like lavender and rosemary to be anchors in the bed.  I also have a three coneflower (echinacea) plants and a few other things that I can divide and put it.  The bed gets a pretty good amount of sun.

F.  I’d rather not have vines but it would be nice to have some taller flowers at the back of the bed to give us some separation from the neighbors (who we do like very much!).  Any ideas?

I think that’s it.  I need to ask Nik to make me a scale drawing of the side yard so we can sketch out some design plans and see what it might look like.  This is probably the last major job we have left and I’d like to redesign it so we don’t have to do any more major bed design/building again.  I’m not worried so much about the plants as just the bones of it.

Thanks for letting me dump my thoughts about this out.  Maybe I’ll just start working on it now that I’ve written about it!  And any words of advice anyone has would be appreciated!