A promise yet to be fulfilled [02/24]

I’m Nathan Langley and this is A promise yet to be fulfilled, a seasonal weekly newsletter on my garden developments at home in Sudbury, Ontario!

Wouldn’t you know it — snow! Or, at least, the weather to permit a light dusting of snow. As such, I haven’t done much in the garden apart from continuing to rake up last year’s remaining leaves, and remove some of the old perennial growth that turned to mush over winter.

Instead, for this week, I focused on translating the rough measurements I took of the backyard into a scaled digital drawing on my iPad. Like usual, I used the app Concepts to do this work.

I started by redrawing the anchor line I used to lay out all the flags when I was measuring out the backyard. From there, I went along at each 1m interval and added in tick marks and abbreviations for each note I made originally on paper.

As you can see, things look a little neater than my original rough notes. Once I had all the tick marks and notes redrawn, I simply connected the hash marks together using different colours on a different layer (blue = pond; orange = existing garden beds; brown = bridge; yellow = property line; dark grey = shed). The result is the image at the top of this email. Once done, I simply turned off the layer with all the measurement tick marks so that I could see a clearer picture of what the backyard currently looks like.

The last thing on my to-do list at this point was to: add a scale bar, a north arrow with a yellow semicircle to denote the NE to NW pathway of the sun, and arrows showing the current ways people move through the space (green lines).

Oh, and the most important thing: the primary viewpoints of the backyard from the house (pink lines along the anchor line at the bottom of the above drawing). For this project, the primary viewpoint is from the kitchen table, with the secondary viewpoint located above the kitchen sink.

At this point in a project I usually set things down for a day or two to think about the viewpoints and let the back of my brain chew away at the problem. I’m not a fan of forcing ideas if there is no need. Instead, I’ll work on coming up with several drawings throughout the coming week for everyone to critique. 😉

Until next time,