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Getting the Best Price for your Home Includes Landscaping for Curb
Appeal
by Michael J. McGroarty
If you own a home, then sooner or later you are going to
be ready to sell that home. Maybe you've already sold a
home or two. People tend to move more often than our
parents did.
There are a lot of things that go into getting the best
possible price for
your home, but the very first thing your home needs is
curb appeal. When a prospective buyer, or a realtor for
that matter, pulls up in front of your home, they
immediately form an opinion about your house. Fair or
not, that's what people do. You can have the most
beautiful home in the city, but if prospective buyers
don't get a super positive feeling about your house the
minute they lay eyes on it, they are going to enter and
view the rest of your house with a negative impression.
Fixing that problem is easy enough to do.
When people pull up in front of your house there are two
things they see. A house, and the landscaping in front
of that house. If the landscaping is unattractive, the
house will appear to be unattractive. Landscaping for
curb appeal does not cost a lot of money, it's simply a
matter of making sure the landscaping is neat, with well
defined edges, and colorful. But when landscaping for
curb appeal, the most important thing you need to do is
to raise the beds with topsoil. Of course you have to do
this before you plant.
Plants do much better in raised beds, and the plants in
the beds really
stand out. In order to raise the beds around your house
you do not have to buy expensive stones and build
retaining walls. Just establish the outline of the
planting beds, cut an edge into the soil with a spade,
and fill the planting beds with approximately ten inches
of good rich topsoil. You'd be amazed at how much you
can raise a planting bed without any type of retention.
Here are two more things you don't need:
Plastic edging. It's expensive, a lot of work to
install, and it never
stays in place. You can cut an edge with a spade and
your landscape will actually look better. Then you can
make the bed a little larger any time you need to.
The other thing you definitely do not need is weed
control fabric. The
stuff just doesn't work. The weeds grow right on top of
the fabric, then
root through the fabric making it even harder to keep
your beds weed free. You'll find a really good article
on weed control on my website.
When landscaping for curb appeal, plant placement and
selection is very important. In a corner bed you need a
centerpiece. I like Canadian
Hemlock because they are evergreen and provide an
excellent background for more colorful plants. In front
of the Hemlock you can use a bright colored evergreen
like Gold Thread Cypress, but don't use too many.
Usually three is all you want. Around the backside of
the same bed you can use a darker evergreen like Taxus
or even a flowering shrub that you keep trimmed down low
like Weigela. Lots of colors are fine, but don't stagger
the colored plants in your landscape, use them in
groupings, and be careful not to use too many in any one
grouping. When you use more than three of any colored
plant they lose their effectiveness. You are adding them
for contrast, and when used sparingly they look much
better.
There are lots of landscaping photos on my website that
will give you a lot of good ideas.
In front of a house I like to use an arc of medium
height plants like Blue Girl Holly, then put a couple of
taller plants behind the arc. When
landscaping for curb appeal you want the landscape to
stair step toward the house. In other words, the lawn is
the bottom step, the raised bed is step two, low growing
plants step three and so on.
If you are re-landscaping an older home you probably
should start with a sledge hammer before you do anything
else and bust out the sidewalk to the front door.
Builders put in the ugliest sidewalks in the world, and
they usually are hard to maneuver as you walk toward the
front door. Once you have the old sidewalk removed, let
your imagination run wild. Remember, you are landscaping
for curb appeal, and there is no better way to establish
ultimate curb appeal than with a beautiful curved walk
that gently winds its way to the front door. Once again,
there are photos of such sidewalks on my website, and
you'll see what wonderful landscaping opportunities they
present.
The last step in landscaping for curb appeal is to
create an interesting
shaped raised bed in the front yard. Fill this bed with
spring flowering
bulbs, and annual flowers for the summer. If your house
is going to be on the market in the fall, add some
chrysanthemums for a burst of fall color.
So what's the best benefit of landscaping for curb
appeal? You'll gain
great experience so you can make sure your new home is
landscaped just the way you want it!
Article provided by http://gardening-articles.com.
Michael J. McGroarty is the author of this article.
Select the Link below and sign up for his excellent
gardening newsletter.
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Sinigang na Sugpo
Serves: 8
Ingredients
10 cups water
2 pieces onion quartered
4 pieces tomatoes, seeded and quartered
2 pieces daikon (peeled and sliced diagonally into
discs) (see below for deffinition)
12 pieces long beans (sitaw), cut into 2-inch lengths
4 pieces green chili peppers (sili)
35 ounces prawns or shrimps, trimmed
14 ounces spinach
Directions
Bring water to a boil. Add onions and tomatoes. Simmer
for 5 minutes. Add daikon, long beans, chili pepper,
fish sauce, and Mama Sita's Sinigang mix, can be found
in any asian store. Continue to simmer for three
minutes, uncovered. Add the shrimps and simmer for
another 3 minutes. Turn off the heat and add the spinach
or kangkong. Cover to steam-cook the vegetables. Serve
with fish
From Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia
Daikon (Japanese: , literally
"large root"; Traditional Chinese: , literally "white
radish"; Korean: mu, literally "radish"), is a
mild-flavored East Asian giant white radish. Other names
are daikon radish, Japanese or Chinese radish, winter
radish, and mooli. Although there are many varieties of
daikon, the most common in Japan, the Aokubi Daikon, has
the shape of a giant carrot, approximately 8 to 14
inches (200 to 350 mm) long and 2 to 4 inches (50 to 100
mm) in diameter. One of the most unlikely shaped daikon
is Sakurajima daikon from Kagoshima Prefecture that is
shaped like an oversized turnip with white outside and
bright pink inside.
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JackFruit also
known as Langka - Artocarpus heterophyllus - The
tree is handsome and stately, 30 to 70 ft tall, unless pruned to
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leaves to 9 in long, oval on mature wood, sometimes oblong or deeply
lobed on young shoots.
Live
Plant - Lychee Tree - Edible Fruit Exotic - 3 Year Old Air Layered Tree
Tree Should Bear Fruit in Spring. Brewster var.
