Browse Forums Landscape & Garden Design 1 May 01, 2013 4:01 pm hi all... need a little bit of suggestions and advices here... I have a small lawn in front of my house (roughly 2MX4M) with existing garden bed around the fence and house, and a curb lawn of (1MX5M). It is NW facing so I do get alot of sun except for the shadow of the growing gum tree on my verge since I never have any success of getting the "lush, golf course" lawn look, and its generally covered in weeds, and the ground is rock solid, i decided to get rid of the lawn and make it in to a garden bed with a walk path through it... I have been reading up, and watching videos on no dig gardens and sheet mulching, and have decided to go that direction by laying: 1. lots of newspaper and cardboards 2. blood and bones, manure and other smelly stuff... (might empty out my bottom trays of worm composts bins to encourage some worms activity) 3. Pea straws mulch let this sit over the coming winter, and hopefully we might get a wet winter and would encourage some decomp so my solid lawn soil would be partly improved. When just before spring, I am hoping the initial layer of straws would collapse a little thus allowing me to put some solid mulch to make it tidier before planting.... Any comments/suggestions with this idea so far? Existing plants I have are: - Gum tree on the verge - 2 Cherry blossoms on the side garden... still small and growing - A small row of lavender in front of my window by the house - Jasmin vine tree thingy along the fence next to the drive way - filled in with little light fuzzy green bushes with small flowers So, the kerb side lawn I am planning to plant some local plants... busy maybe, and needs to be low maintenance, while the main garden area I am thinking either a low growing, and flowering hedge type plants as a natural boudary fence, or some low ground covering type plants to cover the mulch and hopefully provide some flowers too... the middle section of the old lawn would lay some old walk path stones leading to the water tap, and power meter... So it becomes a large garden bed with a walk path in the middle.. Any suggestion to what type of native and/or other plants that can fit this requirements? looking for low maintenance and low water suggestions... thanks my little attempt at MS paint (not to scale) Like ⋅ Add a comment ⋅ Pin to Ideaboard ⋅ add: just remember... I do have existing sprinklers on the verge and lawn that may be converted to drip watering instead; And also I am assuming the soil under the lawn is crap because last time when I planted the cherry blossoms, we found that there were plenty of building craps (brick, rocks, cements) that had to be removed.... roughly about a foot deep.... I dont think I will bother to dig down to clear all the crap (too much work and time needed).... so I thought might be worth looking at building the soil upward instead. there should be ss cable so you can pull up bore pump for service 1 3154 2 9448 If I hire a contractor to convert a window to a sliding door will I need to show them Council approval paperwork? That is, if I want to take a risk of carrying out the… 0 13009 |