Landscaping? One Step at a Time
If you’re looking to spruce up your yard for the spring, realize that many jobs can be spread out over time. Landscaping in stages has become a common practice, with many people doing a three to five year plan.
Live With Your House Before Major Landscaping
This type of approach allows you to live with the house a little before committing to large sections of roses or cutting down trees to add a new deck.
After you’ve been in the house for awhile, you’ll know about sun and shade patterns and street noise. You’ll learn that your neighbor’s large deck parties are a little loud or that you want to block the nearby convenience store. That’s what home improvement is all about.
When adding landscaping in stages, it’s important to start with a plan, like this one from the University of Missouri Extension Service. You’ll want to include:
- Sun and shade patterns
- Flowerbeds
- Backyard play equipment
- Future plans for a pond or hot tub
Start Landscaping With Hardscapes
The first phase of any landscaping plan should be patio, sidewalk and other hardscapes. These areas are difficult to change later, regardless the home improvement budget.
The next stage is adding large trees and shrubs. Large plantings are important focal points in the yard, as they provide screening and add height and texture.
Finally, you can scope out ideal sites for a flower or vegetable garden, and start adding all those little touches.
Landscaping and Your Finances
There also are many financial reasons for planting in phases. A slow approach helps you spread out the costs with the contractor and possibly save money by doing some of the work yourself.
While it’s easy to go, go, go with landscaping, a better approach is to slow down. Landscape in stages. work with your contractor on timing. You’ll be glad you did.
Another great way to save money when landscaping is to install the drip irrigation yourself. It is very easy to so this, as it is just connecting plastic pipe with hose clamps. Drip Irrigation will also make little plants grow quick!
We built a new house and had no money left over for landscaping. Unfortunately we now have a beautiful house that sits in the middle of 1 acre of weeds. If I could do it over again, I would have at least thrown out some grass seed for ground cover. Trees, bushes and flowers are the expensive items and can be added later, but a few bags of grass seed would have been cheaper than fighting weeds!
If you live in an area near US Forest Service lands, sometimes the forest service will give you native trees, plants, and shrubs for free from their greenhouse stock. I have also had luck transplanting small trees from large private tracts of land and planting them around my house(with permission of course).
There are many ways to build your landscaping cheaply over time.
Another place to get free landscaping material is the local landfill. In my area, we can get mulch that the city creates from leaves and x-mas trees that are picked up by the city.
Stages with landscaping is definitely the way to go, starting a bunch of projects at the same time is overwhelming and can bring your morale down when you see THAT much work for you to do. Nice to know Sam, I’ll take free foliage anytime, especially if it is to keep things alive that would normally have a time bomb on them.