Designing a Garden or Farm  

Design is an integrated process, whereby every piece relates to and feeds the others. The stages of the process, analysing & assessing you and the site constitute the foundation, following this you integrate your inquiry results into a coherent whole – a design concept. Moreover, you must design the details of that whole to a point where you can gather all that is necessary to create it. Then you must implement the design on the ground and evaluate it regularly.

A detailed design will look more impressive for sure, but the true gem is actually the concept and the rest merely variations on an underlying theme.

• ·         Start with yourself and get a clear idea of what relevant skills and knowledge you have along with your strengths.
• ·         Identify your vision and goals because clear intentions speed both design and implementation, prevent wasted effort and save time.
• ·         List your personal resources and limitations to know how much time, money, and energy you can devote to the project.
• ·         Get a base map, it’s the base layer and it forms the basis for the design – acquire one easily from Google Earth or Google Maps.
• ·         Collect info about your site from direct observations on the field and off- site resources such as books, local experts and the internet.
• ·         Conduct an analysis and assessment of your site to gain a deeper understanding of each aspect of it.
• ·         Summarise the info from the site analysis and assessment into a rough sketch to see if your goals are attainable.
• ·         Begin designing with a concept design and determine the relative placement and proportioning of the areas, use zone & sector planning and work through the scale of permanence.
• ·         Go into details with the detail design – determining size, shapes and locations of individual elements, use needs & yields and random assembly methods to determine how to connect pieces of design.
• ·         Make a plan for implementation; a plan of action to follow based on your priorities, budget and logical order of establishment, remember to plan in accordance to the scale of permanence.