Three Easy Front Yard Landscaping Ideas
Containers
I like to use a lot of colorful containers. I usually grow a dozen large pots of flowers and doing these allows me to move them about - when something is looking really nice, it can go out front. When it fades a bit, it can be pruned and moved to the back of the house. I can also move them around if I get a bit bored with that color combination.
Hanging Baskets. I seldom use them. They're a pain in the anatomy if not done right.
So here's the deal - small hanging baskets have two problems. T
The first is that the soil in them dries out quickly and if you don't water once or twice a day during the heat of the summer, the plants fry.
They might fry anyway because the soil temperature in those small pots can get way too high for the plants to grow. And it doesn't matter how much water you toss at the plant, if the soil temperature is too high, it won't grow. In fact, a lot of gardeners drown their plants in the belief that it needs more water when what it really needs is to cool down.
I'd suggest you spend the money you'd normally spend on a basket on an 18-inch clay pot, fill it with soilless mix and a pack of annuals - you'll spend the same amount of money the first year but you'll have a much better show of color. The second year you don't have to buy the pot - and you can afford another one and a ton of annuals to give you even more great color.
A gracious front entrance
Maintenance
Here are two simple videos that
1) show you how to prune a petunia - but the technique is the same for any annual plant and
2) shows you the basic pruning systems that allow you to shape your plants in any way you like. When we're talking about front yard landscaping ideas - these simple techniques will make your plants perform the way you want them to grow and your front yard will be the better for it.
Deadheading.
This can be compared to vacuuming the house. Not the best thing in the world to do but it has a huge health and appearance benefit. You fix a bunch of small things and all of a sudden (as if by magic) the entire garden looks better. Take off a few dead or dying blossoms and the entire plant sparkles. Boring stuff but if you only have a few minutes to do something, do some deadheading and remove fading flowers.
Weeds
Man, a few stupid weeds here and there, particularly in the paving stones can really take away from the design and look of your property.
Use pickling vinegar (7% acetic acid) mix a gallon of this with 1 tbsp of dishwashing soap, 1-2 cups of salt and 2 tbsp of cooking oil and spray the weeds in the cracks of the pavers or between concrete slabs. This vinegar “burns” off weeds so get them young, get them early and understand they'll regrow. You'll have to burn them off 2-3 times before they stop coming.
Do not spray this on anything you want to have live. And note if you spray it on weeds in the lawn, the grass around the weeds will burn too - your lawn will look like every dog in the county has visited.
Follow through on those three simple front yard landscaping ideas and your property will look a lot better right away.
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