Learn to landscape for less with these tips
When our home owners association requested our landscaping plan during our house building process, my husband happily submitted his plan - grass. They called us, assuming we were obviously confused by the submission process. But alas, he was not confused. In his mind if you can’t mow it, don’t grow it.
This plan of grass has held true for the last three years in our house, so you can imagine my surprise at my Mother’s Day gift this year, 2 palm trees.
It’s not his fault that he wasn’t born with the seemingly man gene that all our other male neighbors seem to have. He just absolutely hates yard work of any variety.
Little did he know that buying me these trees would lead to all sorts of other necessary projects, like moving the current beds around to make room for the new coming trees.
As we started the moving process I was overwhelmed at how the majority of these thriving plants were hand-me-down plants. Iris and elephant ears from my mother-in-law, tea olive trees from my neighbor Barry, hydrangeas all the way from my grandma’s in Indiana and canas that refused to be killed from our other neighbors Gina and Kirby.
Next to all of these plants were the small, withered plants I had actually spent money at various stores. None of them were worth moving. Seems the best plants are the free plants, in more ways than one.
A quick search of CraigsList brought up someone giving away everything from azaleas to day lily’s to monkey grass. With a little elbow grease it seemed anyone could have the yard of their dreams for free.
This was not my only finding. I have noticed that the deer this past year left my hydrangeas completely alone. Not one leaf had been eaten. This was in sharp contrast to the year before where they took my three bushes down to nothing. So what changed? I didn’t put two and two together until I finally got around to buying some all natural deer repellant, just to be safe. The first ingredient, egg whites, made sense of it all now. For the last year I have let me son crush our used egg shells all around my bushes. I could have saved myself twenty bucks if I had put this together earlier.
Now my last ah-ha moment was my trip to Lowcountry Mulch, which is tucked between highway 41 and 17. As my husband prepared to pick up a load of our usual light colored cypress mulch I decided to ride along. You see our neighbor, Barry whose yard gene is wholly intact, had been spending so much time there recently I was beginning to wonder if maybe there was something more than mulch to this place, so I trailed along just to make sure.
In fact there was more, bins and bins of all different types of mulch. I had no idea there were so many different types and hues of mulch. I decided to go with the hardwood mulch versus my usual request of cypress. And, man alive, what a difference the dark color made in my back yard beds. For only $37 for an entire truck load, my beds looked like a million dollars. They even have a website, lowcountrymulch.com, where you can calculate how much you might need and also view the various types of mulch.
Now I’m not saying all this has brought my husband’s yard gene out of its recessive trait, but I did hear him mention needing some fertilizer. Maybe he’s not mutant after all.