Category: Gardening and Landscaping

How to Generate a Backyard Pond

How to Generate a Backyard Pond

Ponds add value when making an aesthetically pleasing gathering place for your friends and family. Water features attract birds and other wildlife, creating a setting to sit back and observe. Installing your own pond allows you to have complete control over the design, dimensions, materials and place. The process is rather labor intensive and also a few steps require exactness to ensure that the pond is level and leak-free, but the final result will offer many hours of enjoyment.

Decide on a place on your pond in full sunlight which is not under trees that are big. This will promote healthy growth of plants and decrease debris. Call your neighborhood utility companies and inform them of your grinding before beginning your project; wait to come to your house, find and mark power cables, telephone lines, water pipes or sewage lines and transparent you.

Remove all plants in the pond website. Rake the ground to eliminate stones, twigs, leaves or debris. Discard the removed material in a trash bin or put it onto a pile.

Lay a garden hose positioning it in the shape of the pond. Till it marks the outline of the pond adjust the hose as needed. Spray the ground just outside of the home with spray paint to mark the perimeter. Remove.

Excavate the area inside the spray painted line with a shovel to a depth of 18 to 24 inches. Remove any stones. Gently the base of the pit. Place a plank on the base of the hole. Set in addition to the plank. Whilst watching the level check to ensure that the bottom of the hole is level by sliding the plank over soil.

Dig a 10-inch-deep from hole in the middle base of the pit. This hole is going to be the place of the pump. Level the base of the hole.

Pour of dirt around the bigger hole’s border. Smooth the dirt ridge so it slopes gradually downward away from your pond to ensure that rain falling outside of the pond will drain away from it instead of into it. Tamp the soil down firmly to fasten it in position. Lay the plank. Place the level on the plank and check to ensure the sides are in height. Insert or eliminate dirt if needed to correct the height of these edges.

Spread a 1-inch coating of sand in the base of the two holes with a rake. Tamp the sand down firmly. Examine the sand surface together with the plank and level to ensure it is even.

Cover the sand with a layer of paper to add extra cushioning. Line the sides of the hole with paper.

Lay a rubber liner that’s wider and 5 feet longer than the pond hole on the ground. Fold the liner in half lengthwise. Place the liner down one side of the pit, positioning its folded edge down the hole center. Unfold the pond liner bringing half up and over the half of the pit. Take off your shoes and step down from the pit. Walk around in the hole, pushing the liner in position with your feet until it is full contact with the ground.

Place landscape stone in the base of the hole. If wanted, pile numerous layers of stone up across the sides of the pond. Place a ring of stone around the edge of the pond, covering the edges of the liner.

Place a stone in the middle of the smaller hole. Place the pond pump. Stretch air hose and the pump’s cord across up one of those sides and then the base of the pond. Leave enough slack in either the hose and cable so they lay round the pond’s base. Position the nozzle so that the top is above the water level and also rests among stones on the side of the pond. Flex the hose’s end so that it points down toward the water. Cover with additional landscape stone to hold them and hide them. Don’t block the end of the hose.

Fill the pond with water from a garden hose. Once the water level is 2 to 3 inches below the surface of the hole stop the stream of water. Insert a bucketful of water in a river or canal to incorporate valuable microorganisms .

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How to Modify Your Front Garden From Grass

How to Modify Your Front Garden From Grass

Think about gravel to get an environmentally friendly landscape that is low-maintenance and modern if you’re trying to find a alternative to some front lawn. Swapping your sod to get a landscape removes the need for upkeep such as watering, pruning and mowing. Weeding or pesticide usage becomes a thing of the past when done correctly. Cutting back on water and substance usage in the lawn and backyard benefits the environment, particularly during summer months. Additionally, your landscape will appear manicured. Before undertaking this project Seek advice from with the regional zoning laws.

Set. Until the place is cut to a uniform height run the lawn mower over the lawn.

Cover the clipped lawn with newspaper. Lay 10 to 12 sheets of newspaper together in a time and set them on top of the grass. Overlap the edges of every pile of newspapers by four to six inches to prevent the grass from growing up between the sheets.

Black landscape fabric over the top. Adjust the cloth so it overlaps the border of the lawn place. Place rock that is big or a brick every seven or six feet along the edges of the cloth to weigh down it.

Add a 3-inch layer of mulch on top of the landscape cloth. Use a rake to spread the mulch within the region. Leave the region to take a seat for a couple of weeks to permit the materials to start to smother the grass.

Eliminate the bricks or massive stones. Pour gravel on top at a rate of one cubic foot per three square feet of ground area.

Distribute over the top of the mulch using a rake. Trim any landscape cloth from.

Check the coating of gravel. Distribute additional gravel over these regions create an even surface and to cover the mulch.

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Types of Fences for Residential Property

Types of Fences for Residential Property

Fences can evoke strong emotions in homeowners. A weapon can sew or split, depending on who’s on what side of it. Some buyers go into a home and will need to put up a fence instantly to protect pets or children. Sometimes, erecting a tall, solid fence without consulting those possibly affected by it may incur the wrath of neighbors. Selecting a sort of fence that functions well in its distinct location can keep everybody satisfied.

Wooden Fencing

Redwood and cedar are good options for fencing. Both are lightweight products and are rot- and insect-resistant. Neither requires painting or staining –they weather to brown finishes or attractive gray. Treated softwoods, like pine, have some resistance to rotting but ought to be painted or stained. The timber can turn black or discolored when exposed to the components. Privacy fences that are amazing are made by wood planks. Most civil codes put maximum elevation limits for front, back and side fences, so checking with officials can save yourself time and cost. Wood pickets work nicely for visionary, informal fences. The layouts permit air through and allow views both ways. White picket fences are quintessentially American and look in classic Hollywood films that use them to illustrate the idea of”home .” Irregular cedar board, cut to look wavy, or peeled tree branch sections are helpful for producing rustic-looking fences that enhance ranch-style or lodge-style houses.

Metal Fencing

Iron rail fences are powerful security hurdles. Decorative wrought-iron gates and fencing may add value to a house in addition to beautifying it. Victorian houses benefit from well-designed iron fences that enclose gardens without concealing them from passers-by. Pointed caps on rails might be effective in discouraging people from jumping over a fence but should be avoided in jungle regions, as deer can impale themselves in the barbs. The often-maligned chain-link fence has a place in residential settings also. Darker chain-link fencing, in colors like black or brown, can disappear in the landscape. Chain-link is durable and less costly than a number of different possibilities, so where privacy might dissuade a cash-strapped homeowner from picking chain-link, vigorous vines grown up and above the fence may solve both privacy and financial issues.

Vinyl Fencing

Vinyl fencing attempted to mimic wood fencing. Unfortunately, shiny bright-white products looked fake and stood out in established areas. Improvements in manufacturing processes led to a greater assortment of colors and textures for vinyl fencing. A homeowner may choose from parts of”plank” privacy fencing in various styles and colors. Vinyl picket designs will also be offered. Installation of fence panels is fast on flat ground but may be hard on slopes. Vinyl fencing requires no painting or staining.

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Frame a Garden View for Intrigue and Abundance

Frame a Garden View for Intrigue and Abundance

Superior photographers learn how to harvest the extraneous details from the outside edges of a photo to improve its quality. Similarly, you can improve the general image of your backyard when you impose a frame around its views.

The classic elements of style, such as line, form, texture and color, are useful tools when composing and editing the desired scene. Try for simplicity, because an uncomplicated selection of crops, a cohesive bloom and foliage palette, and constructions that are relevant to your house’s architecture are key.

The frame through which you observe and enjoy near and distant views may have vertical parts — characterized by doorways, tall plants or an opening in a fence. Arches and arbors overhead or pathways and stepping stones under form the horizontal plane. Consider each as a significant piece of that general image because you direct the viewer’s eye toward specific scenes.

A gratifying view offers an area of the landscape to be seen — it commands attention when framed by decorative trees, arbors or trellises. A gratifying vista is usually savored from a distance, letting you borrow character’s beauty as a backdrop for your own garden.

Listed below are a few of my favourite pictures that catch the spirit of this idea. Your backyard will feel magnanimous once you open it up to normal or cultivated landscapes.

ROOMS & BLOOMS

Portals, admissions and transitions. Whenever there’s no remote or territorial view to love, you can conjure an interior view. Garden designers use visual techniques to draw and direct the eye — and you’re able to adopt a similar strategy in your own backyard. Here, a full-scale doorway was inserted right into a fence. When open, it reveals a beautiful scene inside.

With thoughtful preparation and positioning of crops, the designer has created a spectacular visual treat that invites further exploration. The fence and door may be entirely functional, however they define and frame how one observes the garden.

Outside Landscape Group

Emphasize character. Peer through this vine-clad arbor and observe layer upon layer of shape, form, texture and color. Each plant is highlighted in sharp relief due to the way sunlight dances across its own form.

If you plan an island bed, then lay a perennial border or place a specimen tree, think about the method by which the sun rises or sets in your own landscape. Backlighting — character’s wonderful gift of illumination — can thoroughly change the disposition of a backyard view. Similarly, the light at dusk or dawn may magnify the seriousness of a vignette, which makes it more alluring in that special moment once the daylight changes.

Sutton Suzuki Architects

Open up views. Thoughtful pruning or editing may make room for a gorgeous distant scene. Rather than cutting down a large tree that may be obstructing your view, invest in the experience of a certified arborist who can open up view zones with targeted branch elimination, letting you enjoy both the tree and the view beyond.

Here, the preserved tree is essential to the success of this design. Not only does it protect and color the outdoor patio area, but it also deemphasizes the powerful architecture of the house and brings one’s eye toward the meadow and hills in the distance. Sublime!

Studio William Hefner

Boost sight lines. If your eye travels via a window or door into the backyard, follow the direct axis. Where does your gaze rest? How does your eye move around the backyard when it’s framed by an open shutter or a divided windowpane?

Emphasize the significance of these viewpoints by displaying furniture plants or ornamentation to make a well-defined scene. While it may be minor in the grand scheme of your own landscape, that little point outside your window is a precious piece of property in the backyard.

With this plan, it is possible (and desirable) that each room of your home will offer those inside a gorgeous vignette to observe.

Shirley Bovshow

Balance the composition. Use symmetry or asymmetry to frame a view that’s near or distant, providing the viewer a restful (living) picture to relish.

You can get a formal impact with symmetrical plantings, such as a pair of columnar conifers that indicate an opening to a garden route. Or use an arbor or trellis, centered over a pathway, as can be done so beautifully here.

Suggest asymmetrical balance with man-made or natural sentinels of equal visual weight. For instance, you can cancel a large tree on one side of this view using a group of garden furniture on the other hand. The things may be different, but together they produce an appealing balance.

Kathleen Shaeffer Design, Exterior Spaces

Beckon with passageways. Highlight your garden’s best views by creating areas to look and places to pursue, allowing the delightful destination beyond to be viewed as an impactful expansion of the backyard’s visual reach.

Employ techniques that frame and define An introduction in a compact hedge ignites curiosity about what is beyond. Here, two such openings at a wall — a door and a “window” — are attention-grabbing devices. The remote garden is half concealed, but it’s endowed with heightened drama.

The programmer has created a view in what was once an unnoticed field of the landscape.

Make it decorative. This portal emphsizes the remote vista, but it is itself a sculptural object to look at and love. Even in the winter season, once the blossoms have faded, leaves have dropped from deciduous trees and perennials have expired, this incredible rock moon gate is an essential design element of this landscape.

Nicolock Paving Stones and Retaining Walls

An unforgettable vista. An enthralling remote scene is incorporated into this beautiful landscape using a light hand. Nothing here is contrived, but each aspect of the domestic landscape feels in harmony with all the water, hills and naturalized plantings from the distance.

This layout works due to the positioning and execution of this rock patio, which defines the outdoor gathering place. The plantings during its border are intentionally kept low so they don’t obscure the view of this water. The older trees on either side are lightly pruned to keep low-hanging branches from the sight of these magnificent hills.

More: 10 Elements of an Exuberantly Abundant Garden

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Teach Your Landscape Rhythm

Teach Your Landscape Rhythm

According to Marjorie Elliot Bevlin, writer of Design through Discovery: The Elements of Style (my college design textbook in the 1980s), there are six components of layout and seven fundamentals of layout. Though these design principles are universal, I find I return to Bevlin’s basic explanations again and again. They’re particularly useful as I seek to understand what is considered good design and why it resonates with me personally.

So for the next few weeks, I’m likely to utilize the many amazing landscape design projects on to research each of the design principles and components. This series will present one subject at a time and showcase the many ways each is now an iconic theme in the landscape.

First up: Rhythm, a principle

Webster’s defines “rhythm” as “the patterned, recurring alterations of contrasting components” The energetic of rhythm makes a visual flow. As a beat is to music, as choreography is to dance, rhythm adds energy into a garden. In landscape design, rhythm makes a physical sensation. It may cause people to move fast, to slow down or perhaps to pause before continuing again.

By repetition of such as forms or evenly spaced points of emphasis, a rhythmic design could be expressed naturally or literally. Here are a few cool ways to infuse your landscape using a dynamic rhythm.

Huettl Landscape Architecture

Repetition in crops of comparable kinds — all circles and mounds — generates a gorgeous rhythm within an entry garden. Color blocking can also be used as a cool layout apparatus to draw somebody out of your concrete patio toward the stepping-stone path. First there’s a section of blue, in the form of fescue grasses, then there’s a band of green-gold boxwood (right) represented by a gold succulent band (left). And lastly, a row of taller decorative grasses in green lures you farther into this garden.

Shades Of Green Landscape Architecture

A succession of plants and architecture is visually pleasing to the eyes, which read it as a blueprint. Here, a maroon, spiky Cordyline plant is aligned using a fence section at a rhythmic repetition that seems balanced and contemporary. Place them together to get a totally attractive setup. The silvery-blue floor cover is called Senecio vitalis, a succulent.

Begin with a very simple trio of square, tall planters. Install three clipped boxwood balls. Line them up from a screen or wall and voilĂ ! You have generated visual rhythm in a single vignette.

Exteriors From Chad Robert

In the 1977 publication A Design Language, authors Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein and many others describe over 250 “patterns” as alternatives to design problems. The patterns follow layout principles but can also be deeply rooted in nature and history, which explains why they resonate with us.

Pattern number 247, “paving with cracks between the stones” addresses the good sense of walking out of stone to stone. Here is a modern interpretation utilizing precast square and rectangular stepping stones at a gravel garden. I love the rhythm it generates.

Rossington Architecture

This easy checkerboard theme is strongly rhythmic. The square concrete pavers read as a grid, as a result of the green grass seeded between every square. Furthermore, this is a far cooler, permeable solution to get a poolside patio than in case concrete alone had been used.

Ron Herman Landscape Architect

Thoroughly random looking, there’s intention within this mixed-media layout. Stone pavers slice through square pads of turf and similar-size squares of smooth slate stones. The overall layout is exciting and very arresting for its rhythm and textural interest.

Shades Of Green Landscape Architecture

Long bands of concrete that alternate with gravel type the ground of this entry garden. There’s a lot of lively energy within this area, as replicating bands of different textures (smooth concrete and fine-grade gravel) invoke the idea of rhythm.

Ana Williamson Architect

Repeating bands look in this entrance garden at a slightly different way. The long, horizontal pathway increases a rhythmic vibe because every piece staggers to the left or right of center. Visually, this is exciting to view and to traverse. Ground covers planted between every band help to soften the otherwise crude installation.

Jeffrey Gordon Smith Landscape Architecture

Here’s another way rhythm plays long, staggered bands. I love the different-colored concrete, which range from light to dark and in between. The gravel is a fourth color, contrasting with all the concrete and suggesting negative space inside this patio. The concrete bands seem to be shifting — is it an optical illusion?

Jeffrey Gordon Smith Landscape Architecture

This beautiful spiral, rendered in flagstone, appears to vibrate with its own energy. The stones form a rhythmic motion as the spiral narrows, turns on itself and terminates in a center firepit. Where most of the spaces between the stones have been planted with soft, woolly thyme, note the contrasting crushed stone used in merely a single band to further emphaisze the powerful spiral line within this layout.

Daryl Toby – AguaFina Gardens International

Circles emanate out of a mound of rocks symbolizing mountains at a calm Zen garden. The gravel has been hand-raked to suggest the ripples on the surface of water brought on by a dropped stone. The curved lines contain other raked lines, parallel ones which have still another sense of energy. Add the play of shadow and light and this instant in the landscape is eternally powerful.

Summerour Architects

The repetitive arches at a classic Spanish-style setting feel both timeless and modern. They suggest windows through which you may peer to the distant, wilder landscape.

Beertje Vonk Artist

A pebble “area rug” generates a pleasing rhythm all its own. It’s a flowing sensation of water, including a kinetic disposition to this patio.

WA Design Architects

Rounded and mounded forms appear and replicate themselves throughout this dreamy meadow — a rhythmic planting scheme that’s memorable and alluring. Santolina in colors of green and silver covers the earth, while purple alliums replicate that globe shape on taller stems. The distant wands of dark purple lavender echo the alliums, including depth.

More:
Pavers for your Perfect Patio and Path
Magical Garden Paths

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