Lawn Care and Landscaping Design Ideas
If you want to impress neighbors and visitors with a new lawn care and landscaping project you have, the perfect spot to work on is your front yard. And the best part about new lawn care is that you do not need a lot of money to transform your front yard into a spectacular display of your landscaping talents.
The front yard of your home is a great place to try out a variety of new lawn care ideas. For instance, you may be planning to sell your home or you are looking to win the homeowner's association award. The best solution, of course, is to spruce up your home. Just combine a little creativity and a couple of Saturdays' worth of work and you can do both.
Below are some new lawn care ideas to help you plan your front yard landscaping project:
Blueprint your Yard
This is the planning stage of your new lawn care project and there are a quite a number of factors that you need to consider.
First is the yard size. The size of your front yard is an essential aspect of your new lawn care project as this will dictate whether you can have larger new lawn care projects, such as islands or trees. On the other hand, if your yard is small, you will also need to scale your new lawn care ideas according to its smaller size, like building koi ponds instead of fountains or other such large constructions.
Before you do anything, find out the square yardage of your front yard first.
The second factor is the terrain. This includes the type of grass you have, the natural elevations, and existing trees, shrubbery and bushes. All these are sub factors that can affect your new lawn care plans and therefore must be taken into account when figuring out the blueprint for your front yard.
And lastly, your budget is another factor that needs considering during the planning stage of your new lawn care project. Consider the resources you have on hand, and then make sure that what you have in mind for your front yard can be covered by your resources. Remember than an unfinished project is never attractive.
New Lawn Care and Landscaping Design Ideas
After settling your initial thoughts on planning your front yard, the next step is to figure out what new lawn care design you would like to try out. As mentioned, the ideas would depend entirely on the factors we enumerated above. However, the three presented below are fairly simple new lawn care ideas that are inexpensive but attractive still.
Pine Straw Island
This new lawn care design is a great way to reduce the cutting area of your lawn and give a home to plants, shrubs, and flowers.
Boundary Island
A boundary Island along the side of your house is a perfect place to plant English boxwoods or another type of greenery.
Pond
Pond kits bring the element of water to your front yard landscaping and new lawn care.
Lawn care landscaping is a game of competition. The goal is simple as simple comes. You want to make things as favorable for the grass and as unfavorable for the weeds as possible. That way, the grass will choke out the weeds, and not the other way around.
Well, that's simple enough, right? And with the right solution, lawn care landscaping should be easy. Follow the quick tips we have below for a great lawn that accentuates the beauty of your home:
Rule #1: Establish the outline of the bed design.
When it comes to layout out the planting beds, most people are too conservative. Don't be like most people. Depending on the lawn care landscaping design you have in mind, make the beds plenty large enough to have room for whatever adjustments you may have to make. At best, all beds should be at least 4 feet wide at the narrowest point. Anything smaller than that is going to be too small.
Another reason why you should make as much leeway for your lawn care landscaping design as possible is because you want to consider the size of the plants once they mature. While you can always trim your plants down, you cannot dwarf them forever. Give them some room to grow. That way, your lawn care landscaping idea will come together and look nice five years from now.
Rule #2: Raise the beds.
Even if this is only rule #2 in the lawn care landscaping rule book, this is actually the most important step of all. Don't be like most people and mess it up. A good height for your lawn care landscaping design is at least 10 inches of good rich topsoil. Sure, topsoil is expensive and wheel barrowing is hard work. However, don't let these points enter into your lawn care landscaping decision of how much topsoil to buy.
If your budget is tight, then better spend all your money on topsoil than on adding more plants to your lawn care landscaping plan. Anyway, you can always add more plants later on. However, once you have the lawn care landscaping installed, you can't go back and add another 6 inches of soil.
Rule #3: Buy good topsoil.
If having 10 inches of topsoil on your lawn care landscaping bed design is that important, then it goes without saying that your topsoil must be of good quality. Be careful of soil dealers who sell poor quality soil but try to pass it off as good soil by running it through a shredder and/or a screener. Although there is nothing wrong with screening (it is often necessary to remove rocks and debris), the process is not at all that important to the quality of the soil.
Rule #4: Plant selection is everything.
The real secret behind great lawn care landscaping is good plant selection. Once you have the beds laid out, and raised at least 10 inches with good rich topsoil, design your landscape on paper. The key is not to know exactly what plants to get. All you really need to determine is where all the low growing plants go and how many of them you need. When you get this right, then you are on your way to a beautiful lawn care landscaping design. | 
