Take a Bad Space and Make it Better
Blanches’ Garden
A few years ago…2012 actually …one of my clients had a horrible old garden shed removed from her garden. Unfortunately, while the awful old shed was gone, the remaining space was a big, ugly rectangle of sand and bits of stone, a lot of weeds, and one stand of Solomons’ Seal (far right). Lastly and the most irritating to my client, a very tall fence was erected by the neighbour after the shed was removed.
The client thought it would be nice to put a few plants in that space and create a garden bed. She also hoped we might somewhat soften the look of the tall wooden fence by adding in some taller plants.
Some of the outstanding problems were:
1) The space consisted of sandy soil with tons of debris in it — old pieces of partially rotted wood, broken brick, iron bars. Nothing would grow in that.
2) The client was on a fixed retirement pension income and could not afford to purchase the large amount of topsoil and the numbers of plants needed to carry out her wishes.
Normally the plan would have been to completely dig up the ugly bare patch and get several yards of topsoil to create a new flower bed. Since money was a problem, I decided we would create a chip bed. *
We would get some free woodchips from one of the tree services (they often liked to get rid of wood chips instead of having to take them to the dump where they would have to pay for dropping them off.)We would then use the wood chips to create a raised bed and would use a minimal amount of soil by making holes in the chips, adding a small amount of soil and planting the target flower in the hole. In the photo below you can see where we had spread some wood chips and inserted a few plants.
You can also see a neat little brick path which we put in so Blanch could walk into the bed.
First I contacted my friend that I nicknamed “Tree Guy” who had a tree cutting service and asked him if he had a nice load of wood chips he wanted to get rid of. He did, and so I left a tarp in place and he came and left a lovely load of freshly chipped Cedar.
I bought two bags of garden soil, which would be used in small amounts in planting “pockets”.
Getting plants would not be a problem — I had a batch of spare plants from various projects where we had to remove some plants, and as usual, rather than throw them out, I potted them up and hoped to find a home for them. I was able to scrounge an assorted bunch:
- an Orange Twig Willow shrub
- a pot of Tansy,
- a pot of New England Aster,
- 2 Double Daylilies,
- a Flowering Raspberry
- Russian Sage
Wild rose — a particularly nice one, which flowers on and off through the summer.
As well, I had dug up a batch of ferns from another space, plus we had the nice clump of Solomons Seal that was already there and which we would move to a shadier location. We would have enough plants to get started.
Next, I, along with my able assistant Marze, set to raking and clearing the target area. Once we removed all the surface debris, and weeds, we began wheeling barrows full of the Cedar chips to the area. These were dumped in piles and then raked level to a depth of 10 inches.
Once we had that large section prepared, and since we had leftover wood chips, I decided that we should integrate that bed with the existing bed along the rest of the fence, blending it all in. (I don’t believe that her cranky old grass cutting guy ever forgave me for those flower beds, which he said made mowing much harder.)
We edged the entire area, dug up a small lilac plant and planted it beside the new fence in and moved the batch of Solomon’s Seal to the shady end of the new bed. We spread more wood chips down so that everything matched. We were ready to plant the donated plants.
As previously described, we made holes in the wood chips, A small amount of topsoil was added to each hole, and we then placed our plants in the holes, firmly tamped down the soil around the plant, then the chips were pulled back to cover the soil. Each new planting was given a good soaking.
While clearing the area, we had found a lot of discarded bricks lying around on the surface, so we decided to use these to create a narrow path through the bed, which would allow someone to walk through the bed without walking in the actual bed. Blanche needed a stable footing because she used a walking stick. Marze undertook this job and did it really nicely. Her Dad worked in construction, installing interlock and had showed her how to make a nice walkway. Blanche was tickled pink, and used the path every day until she was unable to walk.
This is how it ended up after our first go. It still looked rather sparse. That was May 12.
We had left Blanche with instructions to water the new plants twice weekly, and she had been very careful to do so. The result was that all the new plants had begun to seriously settle in.
As you can see, after one year the plants we started out with had grown and flourished and the garden bed was beginning to take shape.
In 2013, I found a Purple Smokebush seedling which was about 2 feet tall and added that to the fence plants. You can see how big it has grown in the photo below from 2015.
For some reason I did not photo-document 2014, so we jump to 2015, and you can see how the place is a veritable jungle.
Blanche was really happy with how her garden turned out. It continued to give her a lot of pleasure, even though her arthritis progressed quickly, rendering her quite immobile.
We continued to look after her garden until 2015.
At that point, Blanche had become very frail, started to have a lot of falls and really required someone to be around all the time. She did not want to leave the house, but it seemed inevitable that she would have to move to an elder care place.
It was always a pleasure to look after Blanche's garden and I was thankful for the opportunity to create a beautiful outdoor space for her to enjoy.
*Chip beds
I first learned how to create a chip bed while volunteering for the City of Mississauga Parks Department. Brenda, the head gardener in our area, showed me how to do this and I have been using this technique ever since.
Her idea was that instead of digging out and removing grass from a target location for a new bed, we would simply dump a large load of wood chips (supplied by the Forestry department who were always trimming and chipping branches) over the target area, shape into a loose bed shape, make holes in various places in the chips to which we would add some soil, add plants, water and Bingo! There is your new flower bed. This method used up the chips, did not waste time and energy digging up the grass. In the collage below, you can see that at this location there was a big hump — actually a huge tree stump — where the client wanted to put a flower bed. We got a tree place to drop off a big load of wood chips and applied them to the stump mound.
