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March 22, 2017 By admin Landscaping Design home, landscape design, landscaping, yard

Home Landscaping 101: How to Have a Beautiful, Healthy Yard

Whether you’re about to turn your tedious yard into a fun and comfy little space where you can relax or you just moved into a new house and you’re eager to make your dream of designing your very own landscape finally come true, here is where you can find all the information you need to start from scratch: from detailed planning to choosing the right plants.

Average homeowners spend barely 4 hours a week on landscape work. Unless you have a year-round plan you stick to or hire home landscaping Bolingbrook services to take care of the job, there’s no way this amount of time and care is enough for your landscape to be as beautiful and healthy as you want it. If you’re an average homeowner (hopefully you aren’t), you are probably not aware how can your lawn pay you back for all the extra hard work you do. However, you don’t have to slave over your yard to keep it healthy, functional and visually appealing. The key is to know how, when and what to do. With no further ado, let’s get started with learning how to get and maintain the yard of your dreams.

Consider How You’re Going to Use Your Yard

Before you start planning, the first and most important tip of all is to consider how will you be using your yard. Are you planning to host associates from your company? Playing soccer with your kids? Have family Sunday dinners? Get naps during summer? Your personal and your family preferences should be the crucial factor to dictate the design of your landscape.

Get Familiar with Your Yard and Make an Assessment

Chances are that you’re not a professional landscape designer, however, you still need to get familiar with your yard and make an honest assessment of it. Consider the topography of your site, your regional climate, your soil conditions and sun exposure. Look out for best places for specific decorative items and find the ideal spot for your favorite plants you’re planning to add. Also, if you want a driveway, check if you have enough space and if it will fit the overall style of your landscape.

Choose a Style

Speaking of style, that is another important step towards a beautiful and functional yard. Health-wise, it is not very important, but it can definitely provide motivation to spend an extra hour or two every week on landscape work. The more you find yourself into your landscape, the more you want it to be well maintained. Therefore, choose a style that reflects your personality best. Decide whether formal or informal landscape fits you better and start from there. A formal landscape features strong lines, symmetrical plantings and decorative elements and uniform plants. Informal landscape designs, on the other hand, are completely up to your taste and you can add as many asymmetrical elements, plants and decorative items as you wish.

Consider Who Will be Using Your Yard

Once you’ve decided the purpose of your landscape, made an honest assessment and chosen a style that fits your purpose best, it’s time to consider who will be using your yard. Will children play games in your yard? Do you have any pets who will be digging, running and make all sorts of mess? Will you strictly use your yard for dinners and meetings? But why limit yourself when you can create a tiny little space for everyone! By using strategic plantings and hardscapes, you can separate different spaces in one yard. However, it is important to consider your budget and keep up to your landscape style. The more realistic you are, the better the outcome.

Place Your Plants Correctly

Before you randomly plant anything, you need to determine what types of plants will work in your current landscape and regional conditions (sun exposure, temperature, wind, etc.) and how will they function in your landscape. Plants can indeed be used in many different ways, but since the way you arrange them will define your creative hour, give your best. Find what plants work best for you and give your landscape a fresh, colorful look. Also, keep in mind that you can use plants as barriers to define specific areas within your yard. Get an expert advice from home landscaping Bolingbrook services providers or Google well before you plant a single flower.

Pay Attention to the Smallest Details

As you’re slowly completing the process of building or rearranging your landscape, you may be getting really excited and easily overlook some not-so-tiny mistakes. Of course, you’re probably a landscape beginner (for now), but paying attention to detail can spare you from a plenty of trouble in future. Garden ornaments, fence posts, hardscapes, lawn and plants, they all have their own visual details, such as shapes, forms, colors, textures, length, width, etc. Making sure that all of these visual details complement and contrast each other can result in an amazing landscape. Aside from its visual appearance, consider all the scents of the plants you choose, because they too can improve the experience in your yard.

Using Ornamental Grasses In Illinois Prairie Style Garden Designs

Prairie’ or ‘New European’ styles of gardening are amongst the most exciting developments of landscape design in the Naperville, Plainfield and Bolingbrook area and very much in vogue. Easy to grow low maintenance prairie grasses and plants are among natures most spectacular creations, producing drifts of waist-high fronds stippled with blooms of brilliant yellow, flaming crimson and soft lavender.

Because of their extensive sophisticated root systems, prairie plants and grasses can be the answer to those problem spots in the garden, particularly where the soil is shallow poor or dry. Once established, they require little attention and don’t need mowing like most lawns so a landscape design that include these grasses requires a lot less lawn maintenance.

Grasses offer an amazing and diverse range shape colour and seed head to choose from recommended varieties are Miscanthus sinensis ‘Morning Light, Miscanthus sinensis ”Zebrinus’, Molinia caerula ‘Karl Foerster’, Stipa gigantea and Stipa tenuissima. Prairie grasses and plants need little except for full sunlight, prairie grasses and plants adapt to most conditions and can be grow in a diversity of soil, from clay to sand, and are tolerant a wide range of soil fertility and acidity. Prairie plants also grow in dry shallow soils or marshy soils that most plants cannot tolerate.

When planning your Illinois Prairie Garden take time to consider a few points before ordering plants. look at the Grasses Page and read the description and decide which plants , Match plants to your soil; dry, mesic or wet. Fit the size of the plants to the size of your garden. Unless it is to be a focal point keep tall plants to the edges. Sketch out roughly the garden shape and fill in the different areas on the sketch with different autumn colors and add splashes or dots of vibrant herbaceous colors and consider whether you will, Plant in curves, instead of rows, it will give you a more natural look. Allow one species to dominate, then blend into another. Try for continuous color throughout the growing season. In a large prairie garden, you may want to make paths to walk along. Turn your prairie garden into a wildlife oasis by adding plants that are attractive to butterflies, birds and other wildlife.

Although the prospect of a low maintenance trouble free prairie garden is attractive the biggest challenge of prairie gardening you will face, if you are growing from seed, is controlling weeds during the first two or three years. Prairie plants spend the first years of their life developing their complex and evolved roots system while common ground weeds put all their energy into producing into above ground growth, crowding out young prairie seedlings and denying them the light they most need. That’s why I would recommended you use plant good strong pot or nursery grown plants or mature divisions from a good supplier such as the Pot & Grass Company as quicker less labor intensive solution.

Irrespective of whether you intend to use seeds or plants the area in your landscaping design must be completely free of weeds and grasses. Heavy clay soils should be cultivated or dug to a depth of 30 cm. (12 inches) to break up layers of compacted soil. Organic matter such as compost, peat moss, well rotted manure or leafmold and sharp sand can be worked into poorer clay soils to improve aeration and water infiltration. Very dry sandy soils in particular will be improved by the addition of organic matter to increase their nutrient and water holding properties. Lawn mowing and raking every spring also helps control weeds and promote growth. You should mow in late June with the mower blade set about 200 mm. (8 inches high).

The growing tips of grasses is just above the ground and they grow from the bottom up unlike other garden plants that have their growing tip at the top. This will cut back early growing annual weeds, but not affect slower-growing prairie grass and plants. Prairie gardens require no covering, no pruning, no spraying, no irrigating and little, if any, fertilizing saving prairie gardeners loads of dosh and hours of hard work. By the third year, there is little for the prairie gardener to do but open a cold one, sit in the middle and enjoy it!

Peter Corbett. Is a collector of rare grasses and ornamental bamboos and written several articles on the subject. Peter advices and assists his wife Heather who runs the Pot and Grass Company Nursery and mail order company specializing in bamboos and grasses. Peter has a keen interest in Chinese metaphysics and has lived and traveled extensively through SE Asia and mainland China. Peter has written a book on Feng Shui “Qi Concepts for energy engineering” which is available for purchase from the Pot and Grass company online store or available as a free down load to customers.

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Category: Landscaping Design

Home Landscaping 101: How to Have a Beautiful, Healthy Yard

Using Ornamental Grasses In Illinois Prairie Style Garden Designs