Saving on your landscape!

As I'm sure I've mentioned before, Todd owns a lawn and landscaping business. So thankfully for me, that means free labor for boosting curb appeal (which also boosts your property value). But really, landscaping is easy and anyone can do it. So much easier than most DIY projects like learning to hang drywall. The biggest money saver though is buying young plants at places like Lowes and Home Depot. They have a yr warrenty (so save your reciept) and in just a few years, it'll look just as good as the plants you want to pay 4X as much for at the nursery! Here is a prime example!

This was the picture in the listing for our house. It had sat on the market empty for close to a year! It was UGLY! Original landscape from 1979 and hadn't beentouched since then. The beds wre overgrown, no mulch had been laid, even the weeping cherry was growing into the roof of the house! This was March 2007.

That same weekend we started removing the landscaping because it was just so ugly. That July, we gave the house a fresh coat of paint, got some new shutters and new lighting. We also took down the giant tree. Then in Oct 2007, after any threat of drought had passed, we put in the new landscape. We watched out for end of the year auctions and got some killer deals on a few plants. We also found hostas and daylillies for free on Craigslist. Note how small the plants in the landscape were at the time we planted them! But we had faith!

This is our landscape now, just two and a half years later. And this is after a good pruning where Todd cut everything back to size. The trees, both the weeping cherry and maple are doing great. The daylillies and hostas are already going to have to be divided this coming fall ad the hollys are growing tons of berries now. The privets along the garage were going crazy but considering they can be used for privacy, we cut then back quite considerably to keep them from getting overgrown.

An addition this spring was the small retaining wall around the weeping cherry. This fall we hope to get a nice size bed built around the maple tree extending towards the front left corner of the house.