Hi,
I’m moving house, and we’re fixing up the house we’re moving to in Oxfordshire, UK now to move in in December. The front and back gardens are about 10m x 16m each; back garden NW facing, front garden SE facing. (Current Google maps image attached, but back garden size will shrink by 3m to an extension).
As you may or may not be able to interpret by the sketches below, the back garden we’re thinking of as a grassy play area for our young child, existing apple trees, planting out a bay tree that we currently have in a pot, patio, shed and some kitchen herbs.
Front garden there’ll be a path down the middle to our front porch, a single parking space in the front (we’re a one car household and there’s plenty of spaces for guests etc in the street), a small space for bins and then flower beds or maybe just raspberry bushes, mint etc between the parking space and the house, and four 4x2m raised beds on the other side of the path to the front of the house that I’m planning to use for growing veg, with a pre-existing smallish coniferous tree behind them that I’m planning to grow some kind of flower up (maybe a rambling rose).
This is the first garden I’ve properly planned, so I may well be being daft here; I’ve previously had an allotment for about 2 years and a small container garden for about 4 years but that’s all my experience.
Given my wife and I both work, and additionally hayfever limits how much gardening she can do, we’d be looking to keep this low maintenance if possible.
Question one: would going for perennials in the raised beds be significantly lower maintenance than crop rotating with annuals?
Question two: is there anything in this plan that strikes you as a particular bad idea?
