Big Projects or Slow Gardening
Your verge garden doesn't have to be a grand landscaping project with a finished product unless you want to make it so.
I have mixed feelings when I see posts on social media showing verge transformation as big landscaping projects with bobcats removing layers of turf and soil and then adding lots of mulch.
Some Council policies assume this will be the approach and so require landscaping plans to be submitted before any work takes place. This can make sense for large projects like microforests and parks but how appropriate is it for suburban verge gardens?
My concern with this big approach for most gardeners is that, if you change your mind, or you get it wrong, especially if your garden doesn't comply with the rules, there is a lot of time and money invested and a lot of pain if you have to remove it.
Your verge garden doesn't have to be a grand landscaping project with a finished product unless you want to make it so.
Slow Gardening
Did I tell you my original motivation was to avoid mowing? That's a clue that I'm a lazy gardener without a lot of time to spare. I garden slow and see the soil life and plant roots as willing helpers that carry on without me between gardening sessions. (Or maybe I am their helper.)
Most Councils, including mine, forbid hard landscaping and garden edges so it's simply replacing the grass with plants.
If you garden slow, loosening a patch of grass with a fork and removing by hand, and replacing it with a little tubestock plant you avoid the worry about damaging services with digging equipment.
You gradually improve the soil you have rather than remove and replace soil.
Tubestock is cheap and home-propagation is free so you can afford to experiment and increase the numbers of plants that thrive in that space. The best time to remove grass and weeds is usually after the rain when soil is soft.
Stop and ponder and chat to passers-by. This is your research. Gardeners using hand tools much more approachable for questions and conversations than a person with a mower or power tools.
Adjust the design as you get to know the space and see how people use it.
This is low-risk, incremental gardening to produce biodiverse gardens that evolve over seasons and years.
It also gives you time to make the social connections to ensure that your garden is accepted.
Some Council policies imply this way of low-key gardening and Hobsons Bay City Council even states that only hand tools are to be used on verge gardens.
Start Small - Avoid the Overwhelm
My verge garden is split into four beds by the concrete footpath in one direction and the driveway in the other. I did the small garden bed closest to the property line first. It was the easiest and least contentious but enough to start conversations with curious neighbours.
It gave me the opportunity to watch the movements of the postie bikeand where people walked and crossed the road.
I had the option of stopping at that one patch if I found verge gardening wasn't for me.
The largest bed was the one with the new street tree, and I did it gradually over the four coolest months of the year. Here are some blog posts I did at the time.
In practice you, and your weather, and everything else that goes on in your life, will decide how fast or slow you want to go.
This free article is part of the Understanding the Space section: bite-sized introductions to gardening in these small but wonderfully complex spaces.
Next: Why Plant Choice Matters