Do It Yourself Landscaping Tips

Top 8 Tips for Do-It-Yourself Landscaping

1) Provide Your Landscaping With Year-Round Interest
Make sure you're providing something of interest in each of the four seasons. Landscaping for 4-season interest begins with a well researched plant-selection plan. The goal is to have flowering trees and/or shrubs throughout spring and summer, fall foliage in autumn and good structure in winter.

2) Layer Your Planting Beds
Layer your planting beds in 3 rows: a back row (facing north, preferably) with the tallest plants, a middle row with the next tallest, and a front row composed of your shortest plants. Use repetition, both in the planting bed and elsewhere in your yard, to provide unity

3) Use Evergreens for Continuity
But don't forget evergreens. The deciduous specimens provide more color and variety, while the evergreens will provide continuity and "structure" for winter interest.

4) Use Annuals to Supplement Perennial Color
Perennial flowers are wonderful for your planting beds, but they bloom for only so long. You may have perennials blooming in your bed in May, then nothing until July. Incorporating annuals into a do-it-yourself landscaping plan will "plug the gaps," giving you continuous color in the yard.

5) Incorporate Hardscape Into Your Landscape Design
Don't restrict your landscaping to plants. Include hardscape features, too. Like evergreens, they provide structure in winter, and much more than that. Walls and fences make an essential design statement, as they frame your property. I'm constantly struck by how much more "finished" the properties with fences look. Decks and arbors are other important hardscape features. Patios and decks provide transitions from indoors to outdoors.

6) Install Water Features: It's Easier Than You Think
Good landscape designs are anchored by focal points. One of the hottest trends is to use water features as focal points. This is one trend with "sound" reasoning behind it: water features are not only visually appealing, but emit soothing sounds. Using pre-formed rigid plastic liners, durable pumps, flexible tubing and cheap fountains, they're also a lot easier to install than you think. Once you've experimented with ponds, you may even decide to advance to the next level: simple waterfalls.

7) Don't Forget the Foliage!
Flowers are great, but don't forget the characteristics of a plant's foliage. In landscape design, varying foliage textures and colors are used to spice up the yard with diversity. Evergreen conifers, while lacking flowers altogether, nonetheless have foliage that offers a myriad of different textures and colors. That's right, colors, too. For not all evergreens are green!

8) Make Your Life Easier With a Low-Maintenance Yard

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Besides giving your yard a pleasing appearance, you must also be sensible in planning for its maintenance. Beautiful or not, you'll resent your yard if it causes you too much work. Unless you don't mind spending hours each weekend on upkeep, plan your design for low maintenance.

Top 10 Tips for Low-Maintenance Landscaping

Take these tips to heart if you're serious about low-maintenance landscaping. Since watering and mowing the lawn consume a large chunk of yard care time, the biggest step you can take towards low-maintenance landscaping is reducing your watering needs and minimizing the amount of grass you must mow.

1) Xeriscaping for Low-Maintenance Landscaping
Those who have had to mow lawns all their lives are acutely aware of just how much work lawns are. But lawns can also be costly, as when you have to replace one that has succumbed to drought. Don't wait for drought to strike to reconsider the wisdom of having extensive, labor-intensive, thirsty lawns. Instead, take preemptive action by changing your landscape design.

2) Automatic Irrigation Systems

3) Clover as an Alternative to Grass
Clover seed used to be included in the typical lawn seed mix, being appreciated as a ground cover with numerous attractive qualities. What do clover lawns have over grass lawns? How about drought-tolerance, cost-savings, environmental safety and low-maintenance landscaping? Interested? Clover is insect-resistant, competes well with weeds and doesn't have to be mowed often, making it a superb low-maintenance substitute for grass.

4) Moss as an Alternative to Grass
Moss can be used as an alternative to lawn grass in shady spots, where grass refuses to grow. Considering how often moss grows in lawn areas problematic for grass, it readily suggests itself as just such an alternative.

5) Drought-Tolerant Perennials
A low-maintenance, water-wise, yet still attractive landscape plan for a sunny area calls for the use of drought-tolerant perennials.

6) Deer-Resistant Ground Covers

7) Rock Gardens for Low-Maintenance Landscaping
Rock gardens typically contain drought-tolerant plants, and the rocks themselves offer a decor that never needs to be watered or tended to in any way!

8) Mulch: Low-Maintenance Landscaping Hero
Mulch is one of the unsung heroes of low-maintenance landscaping. It's highly portable, malleable. If you have a problem area for which there seems to be no other solution, mulch is probably your answer -- especially if you need a quick and easy solution. An application of mulch can reduce your watering needs significantly. Mulch also suppresses weeds, making yard care much easier.

9) Low-Maintenance Landscaping With Dogs
If your dogs are to be allowed to run about in the yard, you'll probably have to make adjustments to your landscaping. But the smartest adjustments you'll make are the ones that keep low-maintenance landscaping in mind.

10) Low-Maintenance Landscaping in Winter: Snowmelt Systems

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Top 10 Mistakes to Avoid in Home Landscape Design

1) Piecemeal Planting: Failure to Have a Plan

2) Having a Lawn Just Because "Everyone Else Does It"

3) Insufficient Fall Color in Your Home Landscape Design

4) Lack of Winter Interest in Your Home Landscape Design

5) Failure to Irrigate

6) Planting on a Hillside Prone to Erosion

7) Failure to Work With What You Have

8) Failure to Incorporate Deer-Resistant Plants in Your Home Landscape Design

9) You Never Get Anything Done in the Yard Because Tools Are Never Handy

10) Forgetting Functionality in Home Landscape Design