Projects, I can haz them

Three of them. My own back garden (there isn't a front one) and two very different gardens belonging to family members.

My garden is a small urban garden at the back of a small Victorian terraced split-level house. Such as of yet nebulous plans I have! There will be food crops, and pretty flowers, and bird feeders, and room to hang out laundry.

April last year, just after we moved in.

The other ones are a Celtic Tiger commuter belt housing estate back garden (henceforth referred to as "K2") and a large rural garden on a mountain side. I'd love to do the bigger garden at the "prairie" style of Piet Oudolf, since it would work with the scale of the place as well as the location,  sloping towards some fields. I've yet to pitch this to the owner, but who would say no to something like this, hmm?

Source: oudolf.com

...not that I'll have quite this much to work with. Thank gods.
For further inspiration, here's Piet Oudolf's flickr stream.

~~~

The most obvious challenge at K2 is the heavy clay soil. Whether it's top soil brought in or the original greenfield ex-stud paddock soil I don't know, but if it's at all wet, I'm not heavy enough to sink a spade in, even if jumping up and down on it.

For the "Mountain Prairie", the exposed location will be an interesting aspect to work around. Other than that, We Shall See.

A productive evening? ...not as such

...this may not have been my precise plan for spending last night, but there you go.

Next steps: keep culling the selection until it's at least remotely realistic, considering space available.

It's just the beginning!!

After a lot of mulling over, I've come a full circle on what I want to have in/do with the back garden. Having realised that the notions of needing to grow my own (ALL of it!) at least somewhat come from the idea of it being something one "should" do (self-sufficiency ftw, come zombie apocalypse or peak oil[1]), I've now reverted back to my original plan of growing some edibles along with pretty things I like.

A secondary epiphany was that, with such limited space, there's no point in growing things that are cheap, locally produced and can be got at a supermarket (read: potatoes). Thusly, current intentions include:

Tomatoes
Legumes
A cucurbit
Soft fruit
Alliums ("Allia"?)
Lettuces
Rocket

Though I may also stick in a potato or two, just to learn how. Just in case.

[1]: cdc, wikipedia