Invest in a Landscape Plan

A landscape plan using landscape design focused on your personal home can help make your house look great, and it can be a great investment. Front landscaping just makes you feel good when you come home after a hard day at work. Plus, it can add significant value to your home. Professional landscaping can be expensive, but there is a way you can get the awesome results of professional landscaping without spending a fortune.

The problem I had was pretty common. I lived in a relatively modest, new neighborhood.  What landscaping there was, was done by the builder. It was the bare minimum, and the plants, trees, and bushes were not exactly the highest quality landscaping material. Plus, the soil in my neighborhood was horrible! In my yard, it was mostly clay mixed with crush and run. Hard do great landscaping with bad dirt!

My first step was to find a local professional landscape architect. Luckily, I had worked with one before in my day job. So, I hired him to come up with a simple landscape plan for my house.  I went over my current situation and explained what I wanted to end up with. I needed a landscape plan for a yard that was

I wanted plants, shrubs, and hedges that were one or two steps above what the builder had used.  But I didn't want to have to pay expensive stuff or to have to baby exotic plants. Finally, I talked to him about his suggestions for what type of grass to use, and whether to put in a sprinkler system, drip irrigation, or some other type of irrigation system.

I had horrible dirt. To fix it, I had 2 dump trucks of compost - not topsoil -  brought in. I killed what was left of the fescue grass with roundup, and then spread the compost (about 3 inches deep), tilled it in to about 6-8 inches, and then re-graded parts of the yard by hand.

The compost was available locally at a municipal dump, and the folks who run it gave me the name of a dump truck driver who frequently delivers for the cost of the compost plus a very reasonable fee.

While I had the whole yard dug up, I added an irrigation system / sprinkler system. You can see some of the photos of that part of the project in the video below. They do a good job of showing all the landscaping material that wasn't there before I got started.  

(If you're interested in me doing a separate post about the irrigation system, just let me know know in the comments below.)

The landscaping plan called for a complete overhaul of my front, side, and back yards. It meant purchasing large numbers of shrubs and trees. For example, the plan showed the side yards edged with a total of 54 dwarf Yaupon hollies. Around here, big box improvement stores and garden supply stores routinely sell 3-gallon dwarf Yaupons for $15 a piece. In the backyard, the plan showed 10 fortune tea olives. Regular retail on 5-gallon fortune tea olives was about $90 per plant.

When I saw the numbers adding up like this, I started asking around about wholesale nurseries.  I found one or two not too far from home. That also made a huge difference in my total cost.

Here's the short video again, showing the before, during, and after.