The landscaping of your yard can improve the appearance of your entire home and keep your plants, trees, and other vegetation more healthy. Landscaping that has been kept up and maintained over the years with trees, lawns, flower beds, and bushes can also add value to your home if you are considering putting it on the market. Here are some landscape tips to help you improve the look of your yard and your entire property.
Take Care of Your Lawn
Fertilizer and Weeds
When your lawn begins sprouting in the spring, it is essential to feed it to keep it looking healthy and growing well. You can use an appropriate lawn fertilizer for spring-time, spreading it evenly over the lawn with a hand or push spreader. Then, you want to tackle the weeds before they begin to become established in your lawn. Weed seeds have sat dormant all winter and will begin to emerge as soon as your lawn can, so apply a pre-emergent weed treatment to your lawn to help combat these new growths as soon as possible in the spring.
As the spring matures into summer, you can use a spot treatment weed killer to stop any weeds from maturing and sending out seeds by spraying an herbicide directly onto only the weeds. Some experienced gardeners apply this type of weed killer onto the weeds with a small paint brush while wearing gloves. This ensure to only treat the weeds and not get any over-spray on your garden plants.
Lawn Sculpting
When mowing your lawn, moving the mower across your lawn in a specific pattern can create an attractive appearance to its surface. Move the mower in a diagonal pattern back and forth or create a checkerboard pattern by mowing in one direction, then horizontally across the lines in the other pattern.
It is also a good idea to use an edger around the exterior of your lawn. An edger removes any overgrowth that can settle onto the pavement and makes the edges of your lawn look uneven and unkempt. You can find electric or gas-powered edgers to use on your lawn's edges to give it a clean-cut look.
Use Mulch Ground Cover
Mulch as a ground cover in your yard's flowerbeds can help your yard out in several ways. Not only does it improve the appearance by creating a uniform look, a layer of mulch also adds nutrients to the soil of your bedding plants and prevents weed growth.
You can use a variety of different organic mulching materials to gain both of these benefits, depending on your budget and how you want your yard to look. For inexpensive or free mulch, you can apply a layer of pine needs from your or a neighbor's pine trees. You can also rent a shredder to process autumn leaves in your yard to create a nutrient-filled mulch material. Or you can find bagged mulch in the form of wood chips or bark that makes a great mulch and ground cover.
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