Tips For Your Spring Landscaping Project

Pittsburgh custom homesWith spring finally here, you can now get to work in your yard. Here are a few tips to create long-lasting curb appeal and beauty on your property.

Going Professional

Before you start any landscaping project, decide whether you want to hire a professional or do it yourself. If you enjoy outdoor work and don’t mind investing in the tools, building beds and planting shrubs and perennials can be done successfully with some advice from the nursery or a gardening or home improvement book or website. If you are looking to install hardscaping along with plantings, or you aren’t sure how to design your landscaping to best complement your house and property, you might want to find a professional.

Analyze Your Site

Whether you have hired a professional or not, you’ll need to sketch out the basic shape of your property and see what you have to work with in terms of topography, soil, sunlight, drainage, and existing trees and other features you’ll need to work around. Don’t forget to consider sight lines for any plantings you’ll be putting in, from inside your home as well as from the deck or patio.

Growth and Maintenance

It’s easy to get excited by photos of established landscapes in magazines or online. When you get to the point where you are shopping for plants and shrubs for your landscaping project, make sure that they will work for your region’s hardiness zone. You don’t want to lose a chunk of your landscaping investment over the winter because the plants weren’t able to withstand freezing temperatures. Pay attention to each shrub’s listed size at full growth, and space the planting accordingly so they have room to fill out. If you want a landscape that will look great with minimal pruning and other maintenance, also take note of each plant’s care requirements.

Extend the Season

Look beyond greenery and color, and think ahead to how your landscape will look in the fall and winter months. If you want to screen out a particular view, look for evergreen trees or shrubs. Incorporating large stones, arbors, or other sculptural elements can also extend the enjoyment of your landscape over the winter months.

Owning a home means you can be as creative with your landscaping as you are with your interior decor. Think about your lifestyle, and design garden space and landscape features for entertaining, relaxing,  or growing herbs for cooking.  With a well-thought-out plan, landscaping really adds to the value of your new home investment.

 

 

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