Low budget landscaping

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Garden and Lawn

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Garden and Lawn

When you decide to lay out your landscape around your house, you have to take into account two things: available time and cash. The cheapest way may imply a lot of time and work, but the results can be astonishing.

Landscapes

Buying stone from specialized stores to border your garden may not be the cheapest solution; try to take stone from old unused structures. To create walkways and walls, use flagstones and common rocks. Achieving wooden decks from specialized stores requires a lot of time and money to maintain it. As an alternative, you can use free stone from a brook or river, but first find out if there are any laws against this.

Hedges

The cheapest way to create fences is by planting hedges. An inconvenience for this is that they take some time to grow, but when ready, hedges are perfect to provide privacy.

Plant Amur Maple if you want an almost 20 feet high living fence, as B. Rosie Lerner and M. n. Dana of Purdue University recommend.

For a four-feet high fence, use Korean boxwood, which is very thick and keeps its green color during seasons.

Trees, shrubs and flowers

Try to embellish your landscape by planting big trees because they create shade easily. If they are too expensive for your budget, choose smaller trees. Ask your friends and neighbours to give you seeds or seedlings. Do the same thing to obtain shrubs. Also, plant annual and perennial flowers from seeds; they are cheaper than the potted ones from stores.

Wild flowers are also beautiful and will help you save money. Besides this, they are very resistant to diseases and insects and imply an easy maintenance.

Lawn

Grass is not cheap so try not to have a big lawn area. Using grass seeds is less expensive than sod. Though, your lawn requires a sprinkle system, water, weeding and mowing. A small lawn area can be watered by using your hands.

The best and cheapest way to cover the soil around your home is to grow plants or to cover it with gravel. Local quarries are the best places to achieve gravel. Wood chips or bark can be used instead.

Mulch

Trees and shrubs need to be surrounded by mulch to control weeds. Because it is not cheap at all, you can use wood chips and straw instead. As Carolina State University recommends, use composted grass clippings, leaves and plant debris to create cheaper or even free mulch.