How to Maintain Your Landscape and Transform It Into a Beauty You’ll Love

How to Maintain Your Landscape and Transform It Into a Beauty You’ll Love

Landscape Maintenance Introduction

A beautiful landscape isn’t just a pleasing aesthetic element that makes your home more valuable. Your yard can help you relax after a long day at work, connect you to nature, and replenish your energy. Some people use their yards as a place for quiet contemplation, while others like to make it a place where they can convene with wildlife or spend quality time with pets and children.

However, you may find that there is a gap between the kind of yard you currently have and the kind you wish you had. In fact, this gap may be so large that you have no idea how you’re going to get the kind of yard you want, given a limited budget.

The truth is, your yard is a living thing. As is the case with most living things, change takes time and money. But when money is limited, what do you do? You, invest time in a targeted maintenance plan that seeks to both elevate and improve the look and performance of your landscape.

To do this, you need to understand some key things about what makes a landscape perform at a high level – both aesthetically and horticulturally. At Moodscapes, we are well-versed in horticulture and landscaping techniques that can be employed over time to change a drab landscape into a vibrant and beautiful one you can enjoy and be proud of.

We know that every yard is unique and will require its own specific plan and transformation process. The steps below will provide a general framework for you to use as you create your maintenance plan for the landscape of your dreams. But first thing’s first...

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Get the eBook: How to Maintain your Landscape and Transform it into the Beauty You'll Love.

maintain-and-transform-coverA beautiful landscape isn’t just a pleasing aesthetic element that makes your home more valuable. Your yard can help you relax after a long day at work, connect you to nature, and replenish your energy.

Download the eBook by completing the form to the right!

Decide what beauty means to you

Yards are as varied as people. What you think is a great yard may be an eyesore for your neighbor. It’s impossible to plan and maintain a beautiful landscape if you don’t know what that means to you.

As you are deciding on a maintenance plan to help improve your yard, here are a few questions to guide you in the process:

  • Do you want to spend more time in your yard? If so what stops you?
  • How will you use your yard? (Entertaining guests, exercising, relaxation, etc.)
  • Do you need your yard to be safe for pets and/or children?
  • How do you feel about devoting time to gardening/yard work?

Of course, you must think about questions like these in the context of their cost. The ideal yard that you would love to have may not be one you currently have the budget for. Don’t let that stop you from pursuing the landscape of your dreams!

We often speak to people with the misconception that, with the right maintenance plan, their yards will be instantly transformed into a gorgeous oasis of nature. While this idea plays well on home improvement television shows, it’s usually not how attractive home landscapes are created in real life.

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Instead, an efficient maintenance plan delivered over time can become an opportunity to employ ecological land care techniques that leverage the landscape you have. By employing strategic actions for small incremental changes along with planning manageable projects you will achieve a landscape you can really enjoy.

After thinking about your ideal outdoor space, it can be helpful to write down a few bullet points that describe the most important features of your future yard. You don’t have to get elaborate or technical: something as simple as, “I’d like a quiet place to sit and meditate in the morning,” or “I’d like to have flowers that attract birds” will suffice.

With descriptors of your dream yard in place, you can now begin to determine exactly what will be required to get your outdoor space from where it is now to where you want it to be. This will require a thorough assessment of your yard’s current condition.

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What does an ecological landscape evaluation look like?

The next step in the process of achieving the kind of landscape you’ve always wanted is to determine what will be required to make your vision a reality. To do this, you have to assess the landscape’s current condition.

It’s possible to conduct this assessment on your own, but unless you have experience in horticulture, gardening techniques, and landscape design, you might miss some important factors that determine what your yard needs.

An expert landscape assessment from a trained eye will help you understand every layer of your yard, from the leaves on your trees and shrubs to the soil below the ground. This understanding makes it much easier to decide on a sensible maintenance plan for your yard.

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Whether you decide to work with a partner or conduct the assessment yourself, there are three key areas to consider as you evaluate your yard’s current condition:

1. Structure

Think about the way your house is arranged: There are different rooms, doorways, and connecting hallways. The structure of your yard is similar — you need to consider how each “room” in your yard flows to the next one, and what kind of plant life each room contains. Just as furniture is added to each room, the rooms of your landscape include your chosen plants and hardscapes.

2. Health

This indicates how well the organic life in your yard is doing. Remember that a nice-looking yard doesn’t always indicate a healthy one. For an accurate indicator of your yard’s health, you will need to dig a little deeper and look at things like soil health and plant health.

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3. Sensory Engagement

This component of your landscape assessment is a bit more subjective because it is based on your individual experience with your yard. At Moodscapes, we believe that landscapes have the power to improve your mood when you engage all five senses — when you engage the sixth, mindfulness, magic happens!

At Moodscapes, when we evaluate a yard for a potential client, we use a checklist-based assessment that allows us to quickly understand a yard’s condition in all three of these areas. Soil testing is also a vital component of any landscape evaluation because it forms a foundation from which all other plant life can grow.

As you are evaluating the various parts and layers of your yard, don’t think of them as individual, isolated elements. All living things, including your yard, are a collection of different systems that work together to form a whole.

The health of your yard impacts its sensory impact, just like its structure will determine its level of health. Understanding how the different components of your landscape come together to form a cohesive whole is key to achieving the kind of outdoor space you desire.

Creating an ecological landscape maintenance plan of action

You have now defined what you are looking for from your yard and determined the current condition of your landscape. Now it’s time to decide what needs to be done to go from the yard you have to the yard you want.

When working with a landscape company, we recommend that you look for one that will engage in a collaborative relationship with you.

We find that working together with our clients allows for the best outcomes because after all, they live in this landscape while we only visit. You can communicate what you see daily while we see the landscape every week or so.

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As far as the actual components of your ecological landscape plan, they will vary depending on what kind of yard you have and what those elements require.

For example, some landscape have a lot of lawn to manage, while others are shaded and full of perennials that need tending.

Customizing your care approach is directly connected to what we find in your landscape; things like the plant types, the sun exposure, the water availability, and soil structure are all layers of your landscape. At Moodscapes, our emphasis is on making your yard healthy strong at each one of those layers.

  • A typical landscape improvement plan applied through maintenance may include the following.

  • Moving plants from one part of the yard to another

  • Starting or stopping the pruning of plants to help them grow

  • Adding organic matter to improve your soil’s ability to foster plant life

  • Adding flowers and shrubs to add color, texture, and attract pollinators

These are all broad suggestions that will start you on the path of coming up with some ideas about your available maintenance options.

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Approaches and tasks for maintaining your landscape at a high level

Like all living things, your yard requires consistent care and upkeep. There are typically three options for effectively maintaining your yard:

  1. Homeowner does all the landscape work on their own no professional services.

  2. Homeowner and landscape professionals partner together to do the landscape work.

  3. Homeowner hands off the care and maintenance of their landscape to a landscape professional to handle completely.

Like your landscape, there is no right or wrong answer — it’s totally dependent on your preferences. You just have to choose the approach that fits you.

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The maintenance activities you’ll need to be sure to include in your plan would look something like this:

  • Cleanups — spring and fall

  • Weeding — as required throughout the season

  • Pruning —for plant health and structure

  • Monitoring water usage — for plant growth and to minimize waste

  • Testing soil health — to be sure plants have the proper soil and nutrients to grow

  • Scouting plant conditions — to prevent and remediate disease and pests

  • Adding or removing plants — for proper spacing, ground coverage, and site

    conditions

  • Mowing — ideally to ecological standards

  • Mulching — to minimize weeds and to help plants adjust to the varying weather conditions

Putting it all together: The Moodscapes approach to landscape maintenance

At Moodscapes, we work with homeowners who identify with options two and three above and we’ve developed specific service packages to help customize the best partnering approach for our clients.

No matter which partnering level and specific package you choose, our goal
is to ensure that the connections between the structure, health, and sensory engagement are strong and ecologically sound. We also want to ensure that you feel your own connection and satisfaction with your landscape.

Hopefully, you now have a high-level understanding of all the steps that are required to create an ecological landscape maintenance plan that turns a landscape that you don’t like into one you not only like but are proud of.

Again, don’t feel pressured to rush through this process. The beauty of working on landscape improvements through maintenance practices is that you can take your time and enjoy the process.

Above all, it’s important to make your yard a reflection of your own personality and needs. Whether you are looking for a quiet space for contemplation after a long day in the office, or you want your kids to be able to spend time outside, the right yard will improve your life and contribute to the natural environment around you.

If you’d like assistance with any of the steps in this guide, contact the landscape professionals at Moodscapes, LLC. We have been helping homeowners in Massachusetts realize their dream yards for many years.

We are committed to creating and maintaining ecologically-friendly landscapes that extend living to the outdoors while connecting people to the healing powers of nature.

Get the eBook: How to Maintain your Landscape and Transform it into the Beauty You'll Love.

maintain-and-transform-coverA beautiful landscape isn’t just a pleasing aesthetic element that makes your home more valuable. Your yard can help you relax after a long day at work, connect you to nature, and replenish your energy.

Download the eBook by completing the form to the right!

Schedule Your Complimentary Ecological Landscape Maintenance Call

Learn how your landscape can change from drab into a vibrant and beautiful one you can enjoy and be proud of.

Every property is special and requires its own unique plan. This discussion is the first step in understanding your goals, timeline and unique requirements.

ecological-yard-careAs far as the actual components of your ecological landscape plan, they will vary depending on what kind of yard you have and what those elements require.

For example, some landscape have a lot of lawn to manage, while others are shaded and full of perennials that need tending.

Customizing your care approach is directly connected to what we find in your landscape; things like the plant types, the sun exposure, the water availability, and soil structure are all layers of your landscape. 

A typical Ecological landscape improvement plan applied through maintenance may include the following:

  • Moving plants from one part of the yard to another
  • Starting or stopping the pruning of plants to help them grow
  • Adding organic matter to improve your soil’s ability to foster plant life
  • Adding flowers and shrubs to add color, texture, and attract pollinators

These are all broad suggestions that will start you on the path of coming up with some ideas about your available maintenance options.

Click this link to request a free landscape maintenance call to discuss your needs and learn how Moodscapes approaches landscape maintenance. 

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