Planning Out Your Landscape

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If you've never managed a landscape design project before, you might be overcome by all the landscape designing selections you can make. But the same principles that lead your room setup inside should lead your designs outside, too. Here are some ideas for planning out your landscape.

Create a list of needs and desires. Do your little ones want an outside play area? Do you plan to grow any vegetables or plants? Would you like a backyard patio? Do some rough drawings of the yard with ideas of where you want to place things. It's a great organizing basis for landscaping design for beginners. These won’t be master plans, but just ideas. A professional landscape designer will most likely understand what you are thinking and give you some concrete landscape drawings for you to look over. You can simply play around with concepts without a lot of time and commitment.

One thing to consider for you landscape design project is the sun and wind patterns. For example, if you want to have a patio on the west side of the house, it probably will get lots of afternoon sun which mean dinner could be hot and uncomfortable. Moreover, gusts of wind blowing around your outdoor space will rapidly extinguish a fire pit. Not factoring in the sun and the wind are typical mistakes for homeowners. Your landscape design should take into account what the sun and the wind do at various times of the day and year. You should come up with solutions to handle the issues.

Part of constructing a landscape is slowly crafting a plan and taking pleasure the process. From your master plan, begin with a little flowerbed. If you don’t have any ideas, reach out to a professional landscape company to help you get the ball rolling. But you might want to start small and give yourself some time to see how things develop. If you put in foliage, remember plants grow and things get bigger. People tend to forget that. The idea is to go slowly and do a little at a time so you are pleased with the end results.

One of the most important things to remember about planning your landscape is being open to change. Unless you're very committed to something, be truthful about what you like and what you can do without. You might find yourself over the years realizing that you really liked one thing and now you could care less.

It is imperative to remember that patience is key to planning a landscape designing project. If all that plain space is too much to look at, and the kids and dogs are tracking in mud, try short-term solutions, like annuals, mulch, or even ground covers. These can cover an area while you're thinking about what you want. Remember: big landscaping items such as trees can be hard to transplant. On the other hand, annuals can be removed and flowers and hedges can be moved somewhere else if you realize they’re not in the right place. However, in the meantime, you have something pretty in your landscape.