4thtenor's Home Improvement

For many homeowners, their garden is the extension of the house. This means that the garden helps show the characters of the property owner, his/her lifestyle and preferences, to name a few. Thus, creating a beautiful garden should be taken seriously. A garden is created with the aim to bring the beauty to the house, enhancing its appeal and value. Hence, a badly-planned garden would result in unorganized, unkempt bushes that work well in ruining your landscape. A well-designed garden would bring color to your landscape regardless of the season. You could even put plants that bloom in the colder months, add hardscape materials, shrubs, or even vines and weeds to blend perfectly into your unique, stylish garden.

Some homeowners avoid rigorous planning process since they see it as a time-consuming and an inconsequential task to be done. The fact is garden planning is one of the most important processes in creating a beautiful garden. You could purchase various different of expensive materials, in different color composition and shape but without this pre-planning; your garden would simply be a mass of lawn filled with expensive materials in meaningless order. Therefore, the time you spend on pre-planning would be the time worth spending after your garden has completed.

Since a garden should resemble the homeowner’s likes and dislikes, preferences and lifestyle, a garden should be created to be completely in accordance with the homeowner’s expectations. There are two steps of design when you intend to plan your beautiful garden carefully. They are garden landscaping design/concept and technical preparation that follows the garden design/concept. Preparation is the creation of engineered design drawings in accordance with the concept of garden landscape design as desired.

Patterns of the land along with suitable plants, preparation of electrical and water installations, and determining the point of planting are some of the things that should be encapsulated in the concept design. The garden blueprint, thus, will be the guideline for subsequent plans. Here are few tips to plan your beautiful garden carefully.

1. Begin with Garden Planning
Planning a beautiful garden needs more than feelings and personal styles, although these factors are often included in a garden planning process. As a garden is an extension of your property, you should make sure that it complements your overall property design and style. You may find inspiration and ideas from your interior design to help find your style, interests and tastes. Create a general vision of your garden landscaping and put it on a paper. Afterward, ask an expert or a landscaping architect to create a 3D version of your garden and get a professional advice that would help you to consider about the technical details of your garden landscaping.

2. Determine your Garden Hardscape and Softscape
Hardscape or hardware elements typically used in gardens are pots, rocks, outdoor lighting, and other garden accessories that will complement your garden, just make sure that they perform and blend well with other garden features, functionally and aesthetically. Meanwhile for the softscape you may use different types of plants. Decide whether certain plant species (shrubs, bushes, and guards) would be more inspiring for your garden or whether you should get a Zen-style garden with piles of pebbles and rocks. Consider the colors of flowers and leaves, and try to mix and match things to create splendid garden.

3. Wrap up with Budgeting
Similar with other areas in your property, you need to maintain a garden and spend a sum of money regularly to ensure your garden is well-kept and the flowers and plants are well-watered and nourished. You can create a six-month or twelve-month budget for maintaining your garden. This budget would include the weed-and-feed processes, dead plant and tool replacements, or change a part or several parts of your garden for the following year, in order to have a refreshed, new landscaping look for the following budget-year. You may also need to include expenses such as water bill, hired gardener, sprayers, nursery plants and pest controls, to name a few.

4. Start the Dirty Jobs with Land Preparation
These activities include excavation work and the reversal of soil, backfill and delivery of fertilizers or additive nutrients. In addition to preparing the land so that seedlings can be planted in accordance to our expectations, land preparation also frees the land from weeds that will interfere with later plant growth. Make sure that you uproot the weeds, so that the plants could flourish well in your climate conditions.

5. Create a Garden Construction
Since you have already had the garden landscaping design and/or blueprint, it is time to put the guidelines into practice. Start with the broader area and construct the garden path/trail. Getting the trail done is important in order to ensure that activities in the garden will not interfere with the future sustainability of the growth of plants and other elements. In accordance with the size of the garden, trail design and material can be made from a variety of options. You may also choose garden constructions that suit each plant’s growth rate. Always take into account the plants’ growth rates, canopy shape, resilience in responding to the weather determine the choice of plant species that will be used.

6. Start Planting Your Plants
Crop planting starts from the kinds of cover crops, which is lower to the ground cover plants. Afterward you may spread the other garden accessories such as coral stone, gravel, stone steps, and installation of garden lights after planting. If you use coral stone, you should note that the spread of coral stone should be in a certain order so that the surface will be able to maintain the circulation of water to soak water into the ground.

7. Clean the Land
After you have planted your plants, the following step is to clean up the mess. Cut uneven grasses, dry leaves and throw away dry sticks, and after you have cleaned up everything, water your garden properly. Subsequent to that, perform a maintenance routine such as pruning and regular watering –and have a beautiful garden that would enhance your property appeal.

Outdoor area is not always a green area or with a line of trees. There should be circulation path for treating plants which are designed so as not to interfere and does not damage the park.

Have you ever seen country garden style? Among the green plants and trees are 60cm wide stretch of coral, which accompanies us to the door of the house. In between there was a sprinkling of coral-footing footing unique heart-shaped, which is at the top coated with the composition of the ceramic pieces in various colors. Footing, a distance of 1.5 m helps to direct the guests to enjoy the park.

Complementary elements that remind us of the park are a park bench and retro element accessories. Among other things, decorative lamp shades, house number, floor mosaics, and the handrail or handle on the side walls to help lead the way on the stairs.

A retro atmosphere is reinforced by the use of brick walls as a residential facade. Make it more Interesting, by using the orange brick with different gradations. Use the orange highlight in between the brick the space. It will look more alive. Giving white color on the window frame and door-forming element makes the overall atmosphere of outdoor space to support each other and look beautiful.