A complete front yard makeover with new fencing, gate, mailbox, irrigation system, garden beds and plants.
The project
We live on a corner block, so our front garden extends to meet our back garden, which is actually the side of the house and perpendicular to our front garden. This is how it looked before I started.
I had a garden design appointment with a nursery to work out the best plants and best way forward. This is the plan I settled on. (The letters are for different types of plants - I had a very big list).
I had Jim's Diggers come in with a little bulldozer to level the site properly. Then I covered the in-ground parts of the gate posts in bitumen paint to protect them. I painted to 10cm above the surface. The end of the post is not painted to allow any water that might come in from the top to drain back out.
I used a string line to make sure things were put in the right places.
Then I installed the 2.4m fence posts. I drew the line I wanted into the soil, then marked the fence posts with a yellow spike before digging each hole. Each hole is 600mm deep and has about two-fifths of a bag of concrete.
I used tennis court wire as part of the fence.I also ran lengths of normal fencing wire above the tennis court wire through the remaining holes in the fence posts.
Starting to put some plants in place.
In the native garden, it was much smaller and I only had to trench the one line. Here you see the pipe being run, and at the end I have a flush valve.
Laying out plants. You can see the placeholder pipes coming out of the surface.
Here is the irrigation system in place, powered by a Holman WX8. The setup consists of five Solenoid Valves to cover all the garden areas, one Solenoid Master Valve, one Pressure Reducer with built-in filter and one Backflow Preventer.
Laying out a ton of Eze Drip Irrigation tube. Almost all of it was looped. There are only two spots in the whole garden where I have dead-end drip lines and that's because there wasn't space to loop them around even with a 90-degree joint.
While I was at it, I trenched the lawn to install popup sprinklers. I ended up buying the Ozito lawn edger just to make cutting through the ground with minimal damage easier.
For the popup sprinklers, I have used 100mm popups, and rotary sprinkler heads. I didn't know much about popup sprinklers, but just assumed I wanted the typical fan spray style sprinklers.
After doing tons of research, I discovered rotary sprinklers, which shoot little jets of water at alternating lengths. They don't consume a lot of water, are fairly wind resistant and therefore I was able to do my entire lawn with just six sprinklers.
I wanted an old medieval feel to the door at the main entrance to the garden. I used 100 x 25mm treated Pine sleepers as the main door front, and 70 x 25mm treated Pine for the frame.
Here's the finished and planted native garden with the beautiful postbox from Bunnings and stained the doorway entrance.
Then I installed stone pavers for the path. I decided not to set them into the ground as they'd be lost into the mulch when put in.
Before and after
