Landscaping

Installing and maintaining landscaping around your home can be a costly undertaking. Even the perfect landscape can end up a source of vexation instead of pleasure — if it costs you more than you can afford to install and keep up.

With these few helpful tips, you can save money on your landscaping without sacrificing quality or beauty.

Plan Before You Spend

Plan before you make any purchases. Without a plan, you may buy things you don’t really need, and that can waste money.

Begin with a rough sketch of your landscape design. Next find out exactly what you need to make it possible. If you need advice, there are a number of websites where you can get ideas for creating your project. Specialty stores and some home improvement warehouses have experts on hand who can give you pointers.

Once you’ve done your homework, and know exactly what you need, you can start spending, without fear of money wasters intruding.

Purchase In Phases

Your written plan should include a timetable for when you will install each portion of your landscape. Most people can’t afford to make all the changes at once. Planning your landscape project in phases lets you buy what you need as you go, and as the money becomes available. This phased financing lets you avoid the interest and fees associated with home improvement loans or putting your purchases on credit cards.

Don’t Sacrifice Quality

It’s good to remember that cheaper is not always better. If there is very little difference in quality, then buying the cheaper item is naturally the best course. However, local stores are often staffed with seasoned experts who will share their wisdom for free if you ask questions while making a purchase. Specialty stores can give you accurate information on installing a water feature, for example. If you are inexperienced in landscaping, you can save money in the long run by spending a little extra for better service, experienced help and advice.

Check Plants Carefully

If you’re making your purchases at a “big box” store, be sure to carefully inspect plants for diseases and insect problems. These stores seldom give their plants the kind of care that a nursery would. If the plant you buy is diseased, you’ll have to buy it all over again when it dies, and that’s money down the drain. Furthermore, the disease or pest can spread to your other landscaping. Many nurseries offer warranties and guarantees free of charge on their plants.

Buy When Prices Are Low

If you plan your landscaping ahead, you can determine when each phase needs to be accomplished. You can buy lumber during the winter when it is cheaper, and store it until you are ready to use it. Buy trees, shrubs, perennials, mulch, and soil late in the season when the prices go down. In most places, you can wait until October to make your maintenance purchases and still have time to winterize your landscape. Keep an eye out for plant sales at local nurseries. You can find really good quality plants at low prices this way.

Pursue Other Resources

Explore alternative resources. Stores are not the only places to get what you need. You can order through catalogs or online. Membership in a garden and seed club can yield very good prices on many items, as well as useful advice.

Try arranging a plant exchange in your neighborhood. Some cities offer low-price or free mulch and compost, and you can check construction or demolition sites for free stones and bricks.

Neighborhood Cost Sharing

Approach your neighbors about sharing costs. If you pool your resources, you can get some good deals on items bought in bulk, and everyone benefits. In the same vein, you can share the rental fees for machinery such as chippers, tillers, and aerators. If everyone chips in a few dollars, you can work out a schedule that lets each neighbor use the equipment before it is due back. This is a great way to reduce the costs of your landscaping.

By heeding a few of these money-saving tips, you can hold down your costs and create a beautiful landscape that you can afford to maintain.

If you have interest in using landscaping stone in your yard, garden, koi pond or walkway, don’t limit yourself to the traditional. Consider finding or shopping for unique stones to add flair or accent to your plans. Landscaping stone can be versatile, used for simple decoration or as a foundation for much more.
Some of the uses for landscaping stone include flooring, such as for a patio, foundations for outbuildings, such as a gazebo, or even outbuildings completely made of stone. Fireplaces look great in stone (just watch out for river rock; pockets of steam could heat up and explode in a fire pit or fireplace) as do bases for planters. Entire columns could be made of stone, either as end caps for a stone wall or to support lamps or planters.
Whatever you eventual use of landscaping stone, seek out the unusual. Below are just two examples of what you might find.
Geodes
Geodes, on the surface, seem like unremarkable, round, fist sized lumps of white or tan rock. They could serve well in a planter or flowerbed for a little hardscaping, but the real gem about these rocks lays inside. Some geodes are lined inside with layered siliceous material of various color or even clear quartz crystals; the effect is a wavy, smooth, crystalline surface. You may not have a diamond-saw handy to slice one open, but you should be able to find nice specimens in a rock shop. They make great bookends for indoors, and can frame a showcase plant in your garden.
Thunder Eggs
It is almost worth using Thunder Eggs as a landscaping stone just for the great conversation possibilities. If the name was not unusual enough, it is also the State Rock of Oregon (although it is more a stone than a rock, but I suppose State Stone is asking too much.) Thunder Eggs are very much akin to geodes, as they are a shell filled with agate. They are different from geodes in that they have a solid center, often displaying a great contrast between the rocky shell of brown and the milky white and clear crystal center. Even solid, undivided Thunder Eggs are interesting to look at, with bubbly protrusions that do give the appearance of some strange egg.
Check with rock shops that cater to rock hounds for some unique finds. While the expensive might prohibit you from paving your patio with Thunder Eggs, a combination of a few unique specimens with more traditional landscaping stone would work well with almost any plan.

A complete makeover of your home’s landscape may not be possible. After all, there is no surprise that if you choose to completely re-do your landscape you will spend a great deal of money. However, there are surprising hidden costs in nearly any landscaping project, even some of the small ones. It is important to be aware of some of the costs that you might not normally think of before you begin a project. Otherwise, you will find that the project’s true cost is much more than you thought it would be, and you may discover that you might not have been able to afford your landscape change after all.
Perhaps the most hidden of landscaping costs involves features that require lighting and water. Many people think only of the cost of the equipment, and the cost of putting it in (which is minimal if they put it in themselves). They fail to consider how much money they will spend in the form of paying for increased energy and water usage. With outdoor lighting, it is possible to mitigate this cost somewhat by buying more energy efficient bulbs, or by confining the use of outdoor lighting to times when there is a special occasion. There is no reason for the lighting if you only use it so that the neighbors can admire your landscape even at night. Reserve the use of your outdoor lighting for times when you are entertaining people out of doors, or when you are sitting in your yard at night, and may need the light. Water features are a double whammy, as they require energy and water. Using a feature that reuses its own water can cut down a little bit on your water usage (although there will always be water lost to evaporation), and it is now possible to find some features that use less energy. However, if you must have a water feature and are afraid of the costs you will incur, you can always choose a very small pond or waterfall.
Related to the issue of water features is paying for water use when you water the lawn. Setting up sprinklers on a timer will ensure that you do not have to rely on your memory to remember to turn them off. It is important to note that most people water their lawns two or three times more then they need to. The average lawn actually receives about the same amount of water as a tropical rainforest. This is not necessary for your lawn. Watering each part of your lawn for 15 minutes two or three times a week (depending on climate) is usually sufficient, if it is not new sod (which requires a good soak every day the first week). Additionally, it is a good idea to take into account the amount of extra water you will be using to help sod or a tree establish itself. This can add up to be quite a bit of extra water, and if you city charges more money once your usage reaches a certain point, it can be even more costly.
Also, you may not realize how much money you might spend if your soil is poor. Before being in raptures about a particular plant, determine what kind of soil it needs to thrive, this will make a difference in whether your plant lives or dies. The costs of adding fertilizer to sandy soil or gypsum to clay soil can begin to add up. This problem can be remedied, however, if you examine what plants grow natively in your region. By choosing plants that grow well in the soil you have, or in near conditions, you can save a great deal on soil amendment. Most local master gardeners will give you guidance on native plants for free, or for a very small fee.
Just as there are hidden costs in nearly everything, landscaping, too, has hidden costs. The key is to be informed about the various consequences of your landscape choices, and to be careful in what you decide to do. While the up front costs may not be too unreasonable, you may find that as you continue to enjoy your new landscape, the later costs may be more than your landscape is worth.

Landscaping driveways does not necessarily mean the driveway itself, although the design of your driveway can impact the look and feel of your landscape. Rather, many people neglect to landscape their driveways to look attractive. This includes adding landscaping elements to the sides of the driveway, as well as at the bottom and the top of the driveway. There are many softscape and hardscape elements that can be added to make the area surrounding the driveway more attractive.
Your driveway landscape is the entrance to your property. If you ignore it, the driveway can look more like an ugly scar than a part of your landscape. If properly incorporated, however, it is possible to create a nice looking element in your landscape, tying it in to the rest of your design and looking as though it truly belongs. It is very worth your while to make an attempt at landscaping around your driveway. You need not spend a great deal of money to landscape your driveway, but if you carefully choose features and elements that are attractive and creative, you can have a fairly low-cost driveway landscape that is inviting to visitors as well as to those who live inside the house.
Before landscaping the driveway, however, there are a few things to take into account. First of all, you need to make sure that what you are doing will not be so much wasted work. Take into account your neighborhood. If there are a great deal of children, a flower bed at the entrance, near the street, may not be a wise decision. It may be trampled careless children, or the flowers may be picked. While these actions do not usually the products malice, they can result in a ragged and disheveled looking driveway entrance. In such a neighborhood one might consider accenting the entrance with an attractive fence, rock wall, or even a small rock garden. Also determine the footpaths traveled by those who live in the house. Make sure that any elements you add to the sides or ends of the driveway are not interfering in established walkways.
Some of the common hardscape options are walls and fences. These are projects that can add distinction and accent to your driveway area. A rock wall can be especially interesting if you use different colored rocks. It is also possible to plant grasses and small, hardy flowers in the cracks between the stones used to construct the wall. This can be decorative and it can add a more interesting aspect to your rock wall. Short, attractive fences, and even some of higher height, can also accent the driveway and give it a little more color and character. Small hanging baskets or lanterns can be used with either a fence or a wall to add more beauty.
There are plenty of softscape options for dressing up the area around the driveway. The first thing you need to decide (and this goes for hardscape accents as well) is whether you plan to use the landscape elements to run the length of the driveway or to simply accent the entrance to the driveway. If you are working with a very small budget, simply accenting either side of the driveway, near the bottom, is a good idea. It will cost much less, but add a great deal to the look of your over all landscape. Some of the softscape ideas that work well either to follow the driveway up or simply to add character to the entrance, include beds of colorful annuals, groundcover along the drive to create a natural and interesting border with the lawn, ornamental trees, and shrubs. The shrubs can even be cut to be topiary and have interesting designs.
A curved driveway is interesting of itself, and can be made even more so if a focal point is added to nestle in the curve. This focal point should be something of beauty. It can be as simple as a stately oak, or a specially designed flowerbed or rock garden. Or, instead of being something simple, the focal point can be something else entirely. Landscape bridges, wishing wells, garden arbors, and water gardens all make excellent focal points that can be exceptionally attractive.