Stumps. Ugh. If you can, get a professional to take those out and have the holes filled right away — a professional arborist because it's so much work! It isn't just the ants and termites you have to be aware of. When stumps decompose, they let off gasses and lye which makes the soil noxious for surrounding plants and changes the pH from acidic to alkalyne. That's bad news. If you were in a woodland area, I would say, drill holes, pour in water and let nature take its course. But you probably want your yard to look like something in a few years, so ...
If you can't afford that, consider building container gardens around the stumps.
Plant least one tall evergreen tree on the north/northeast side for winter colour, shelter for the birds and shelter from the north wind. Plant one deciduous shade tree near the house for summer coolness. If it's a fruit tree, you will have the prettiest blossoms in the spring, and they will smell like heaven, but you will get wasps.
Plant a background of 2-3 different vines right against the fence. Support them with netting. Let them crawl over the wood. They can be taken out later, when the staging areas grow in, but prior to that, you want something nice to look at. (Later, you might want to transplant them to places where you want to build secretive arbors.)
Intersperse the spaces between the vines with 2 to 3 trio-arrangements of dwarf evergreens and ornamental shrubs in the foreground. So that's 2 or 3 staging areas with 3 small trees and shrubs apiece, or 6 - 9 small to medium sized trees and shrubs in all. Choose them for the variety of their shapes, year-round colour, texture and height — the ones that grow taller should obviously be placed in the back, or kept trimmed right down. So you're constructing jewel box areas where all the different shapes, colours, textures and colours will give you lots of visual interest all year-round.
Until they fill in, (think about 4 - 5 years) plant perennial fillers in between them like wormwood (feathery, silver), daylilies (spikes), peonies/hydrangeas. When the trees start getting to be the right height and diameter, you can take the others out.
For ground cover, make sure you use a variety of colours and textures ... creeping jenny interspersed with scottish moss, for example.
__________
So, that's a plan for a backyard garden that will give you shade, shelter from the wind, privacy, visual interest all year round, interesting colours all year round and a means of keeping out the worst weeds (although you still have to keep on top of weeding; short of paving over everything, there's no way out of that.)
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A Longterm Garden Plan ...
Date: 2011-08-25 06:46 pm (UTC)So for your space:
Stumps. Ugh. If you can, get a professional to take those out and have the holes filled right away — a professional arborist because it's so much work! It isn't just the ants and termites you have to be aware of. When stumps decompose, they let off gasses and lye which makes the soil noxious for surrounding plants and changes the pH from acidic to alkalyne. That's bad news. If you were in a woodland area, I would say, drill holes, pour in water and let nature take its course. But you probably want your yard to look like something in a few years, so ...
If you can't afford that, consider building container gardens around the stumps.
Plant least one tall evergreen tree on the north/northeast side for winter colour, shelter for the birds and shelter from the north wind. Plant one deciduous shade tree near the house for summer coolness. If it's a fruit tree, you will have the prettiest blossoms in the spring, and they will smell like heaven, but you will get wasps.
Plant a background of 2-3 different vines right against the fence. Support them with netting. Let them crawl over the wood. They can be taken out later, when the staging areas grow in, but prior to that, you want something nice to look at. (Later, you might want to transplant them to places where you want to build secretive arbors.)
Intersperse the spaces between the vines with 2 to 3 trio-arrangements of dwarf evergreens and ornamental shrubs in the foreground. So that's 2 or 3 staging areas with 3 small trees and shrubs apiece, or 6 - 9 small to medium sized trees and shrubs in all. Choose them for the variety of their shapes, year-round colour, texture and height — the ones that grow taller should obviously be placed in the back, or kept trimmed right down. So you're constructing jewel box areas where all the different shapes, colours, textures and colours will give you lots of visual interest all year-round.
Until they fill in, (think about 4 - 5 years) plant perennial fillers in between them like wormwood (feathery, silver), daylilies (spikes), peonies/hydrangeas. When the trees start getting to be the right height and diameter, you can take the others out.
For ground cover, make sure you use a variety of colours and textures ... creeping jenny interspersed with scottish moss, for example.
__________
So, that's a plan for a backyard garden that will give you shade, shelter from the wind, privacy, visual interest all year round, interesting colours all year round and a means of keeping out the worst weeds (although you still have to keep on top of weeding; short of paving over everything, there's no way out of that.)