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.

With conventional watering systems, water is lost through run off, evaporation, blown away by wind, and wasted on non-growth areas. The drip irrigation method is typically more than 90% efficient at allowing plants to use the water applied, whereas sprinklers are only 70% efficient.

It makes sense to install a drip irrigation system in your yard. Then you don’t need to worry about getting the right amount of water at the right time, nor do you have to move sprinklers all the time.

An irrigation system is not cheap, however it will pay for itself over time and most do it yourselfers can install it easily.

What Is It?

Drip irrigation is actually a combination of several types of low-pressure, low-volume water delivery systems. The correct term for these systems is microirrigation. Each microirrigation system is distinguished by a different style of emitter (the part that discharges the water).

Drip irrigation is the  precise and slow application of low pressure water directly to the plant’s roots using emitters. A drip irrigation system is a series of interconnected flexible plastic tubing. The tubes have holes placed at specific intervals to fit with the placement of your plants. The system is either buried or placed on the ground next to the plants.

Advantages

By keeping the plant’s roots moist (but not to the point of saturation) you actually use less water than with conventional watering techniques. Maintaining an ideal moisture level in the soil at all times results in:

• deep watering
• efficient watering
• water conservation
• very little evaporation
• water only where plants are
• no wind to carry the water away
• deeper roots
• healthier roots (by reducing disease problems associated with high levels of moisture on plants)
• plants are hardier: more resistant to pests, drought, and disease
• more abundant foliage
• increase yields
• no uv degradation of plastic and other materials exposed to sunlight
• decreases water, fertilizer, and labor if managed properly.

Where To Use

Drip irrigation systems are most often installed around flowers, shrubs, and even trees. This targeted approach allows watering to be more effective and efficient. It helps ensure that each of the landscape’s individual elements are properly watered.

A drip irrigation system can be easily concealed with a layer of mulch, so that the system does not detract from the appearance of your property.

How To Install

Installing drip irrigation is simple, using kits available at most home improvement stores. Kits come with instructions that clearly explain all the steps. There are a few tools needed for the installation, but you probably already have them. The installation takes 1 day or less.

You can make plant maintenance even easier by adding a timer to your system. The timers can be purchased at home improvement stores and are easy to install as well. Timers insure that your plants get watered without you needing to remember to do so. They help your plants get exactly the right amount of water at the right time.

Your drip irrigation system can be used with “irrigation zones” in your landscape. Plants with similar water needs should be planted in the same area, so that they can be more efficiently watered. This helps you to not overwater some plants just because others in the area need more water.

It’s easy to change the configuration of a drip system. So, a drip system will evolve as your needs change.

All in all, drip irrigation systems are economical as well as a good choice for keeping your plants healthy and hardy. They can help to improve your garden … the easy way.