Landscape Now

Garden landscaping is one of the most enjoyable home improvements anyone can make. Layering plants, rearranging existing flowers and shrubs and cultivating color, texture and garden layout are fun and exciting techniques to give your home a well-deserved makeover. Here are just a few garden landscaping ideas to help you get started.

By layering your garden beds, you are able to add a whole other level of excitement to your landscaping design. Your yard, particularly the front area, is the first thing that people see when they come to your house and leading a grand tour that includes a breathtaking garden is always fun. You will be the talk of the neighborhood when you utilize good garden landscaping ideas.

Layering your garden landscaping design is not difficult. You need to understand the flowers that you are going to plant first, however. The choices that you select as far as the flowers and other foliage will affect just how your garden landscaping is laid out. For example, you do not want to have the taller plants in front of the smaller ones. This is obvious, but you had better make a blueprint of where you want things planted in your landscaping before you begin. This will help you to keep things as simple as possible and aid you in avoiding bigger problems with drainage, poor soil and incompatible color combinations. Your landscaping will go a lot smoother this way and you will run into fewer problems as you go.

When layering you should create about three layers. Your back row should face north, if feasible, and it should contain the tallest plants. As the rows descend, so should the heights of the plants and flowers. Place the medium and ground level plants in front of the larger ones.

The difficulty of this approach to landscaping is that often the plants we buy are baby plants. So you will need to talk to those working at your local gardening store about how large the plants will grow to be. This is crucial to successful garden landscaping. If the front or middle row of your garden landscaping design is growing higher than the last row, then you will have to do some rearranging.

Think about how you will water your layers so that your irrigation system makes it effortless for you to reach all your plantings. Layering plants requires a little education, but the results are well worth the time you spend.

Layering plants will bring depth and make your foilage much more interesting to see. Garden landscaping ideas like these will make your garden landscaping a success, increasing your property value and making your garden a more beautiful and appealing place to live.

People are becoming more interested in using landscape techniques that won’t harm the earth. Organic landscaping, in addition to being great for the environment, provides benefits for your your health. Pesticides and fertilizers can harm adults, children and animals.

It’s an alarming thought, but illness can result not only from the improper use of pesticides, but also from the so-called proper use of these chemicals.

In addition to our health, another benefit of organic gardening can also be felt in the wallet. By making use of the resources that you already have on hand, you can save money with do-it-yourself organic landscaping, rather than paying money for chemicals to unnaturally enhance your plants.

Native Plants

One of the best ways to practice organic landscape is to make use of native plants. Bringing in exotic plants or non-native plants from areas with very different conditions only results in frustration and the possible reliance on chemicals to help you take care of them.

It is so much easier to naturally promote the health of your landscape when the plants you use thrive in your area. They thrive because they have built up defenses over time against their local enemies. If you want to keep a landscape that works with the natural setting, native plants, or plants from areas with similar conditions, can help you accomplish this.

Healthy Lawns

The most obvious part of a landscape is usually the lawn. Many people seem to think it is necessary to use a great deal of chemicals to keep pests from ruining the lawn or to help the lawn grow well. However, the truth of the matter is that by actively caring for the soil under your grass, you can create a healthier lawn. A beautiful lawn can be achieved in many ways that do not involve harmful chemicals.

Organic Fertilizers

The composition of organic fertilizer is made entirely of organic materials. Although initially more expensive, if used regularly, the long-term costs will be reduced because organics decrease the need for later expensive chemicals. Over-all the costs even out because synthetic fertilizers need to be applied more frequently.

Aeration

The use of aeration is another way to take care of the lawn that promotes healthy soil and better grass roots. Aerating your lawn relieves soil compaction by punching holes in the ground and helps make the soil easier for grass roots to penetrate.

This allows the roots have more room to go deeper, and organisms, like earthworms, that actually help the health of your lawn, have more room to move about and make their homes. This will result in a naturally healthy lawn ecosystem that can withstand pests and keep weeds out on its own.

Over Seeding And Top Dressing

Other organic practices that improve the health of the lawn are over seeding and top dressing. Over seeding makes use of more than the recommended amount of grass seed – about one and a half times more than the recommended amount.

Over seeding promotes quicker germination and that results in a thicker lawn that really fights the weeds!

Top dressing is the act of taking composted organic matter and mixing it with sand 50-50. A thin layer is then spread over the lawn. This improves the lawn rooting, creating healthier, hardier grass, without fertilizer.

Common Sense Gardening

If you practice common sense in using gardening techniques, fertilizer (organic or otherwise) may not even be necessary. Create your own compost and mulch by using grass clippings from the lawn mower and leftovers from the garden. Also add in raked leaves, pine needles and (parradoxically) weeds.

Left to decompose, this creates nutrient-rich organic matter that can be used to improve the health of all the plants in your landscape, not just grass.

When you do it yourself, organic gardening can be a very rewarding and money saving effort.