9 Landscaping Tips for Summer: Planning Ahead
When you own a home in our beautiful, mountainous state, landscaping and lawn care are a vital part of maintaining your home and making sure the exterior aesthetic stays looking great. Your landscaping, including your lawn, can take a beating during both the harsh Colorado winter weather and during the high heat summers. Our landscape designers here at Bella Giardino Landscape and Garden Design put together 9 helpful landscaping tips for this summer to help keep your yard looking pristine and prepare for your dream design or redesign for next year:
1. Get New Ideas from Research
If you are looking to refresh your landscaping for Spring 2022, summer is a great time to start thinking of luxurious new ideas. Having an end goal in mind can help point you in the right direction for what that new landscape design looks like. We encourage you to search online, walk around your neighborhood, watch the Home & Garden, HGTV, channel and create a list of new ideas you’ve found and love. Not only do these resources provide you inspiration, but they can also allow you to better understand what all is involved in creating that specific yard design. So hop online or on TV and start your list this summer!
2. Create a Vision Board
Another one of our great landscaping tips for Summer 2021 to begin outlining your dream landscape is to create a vision board. Writing your dreams or goals down, getting physical copies of images you’re striving for and organizing them in one single place like a vision board has been well known for helping goals come to fruition. It’s a practice many people use for their own personal or professional goals for the year, so why not curate one for your dream luxury landscape? Gathering inspirations, laying out specific colors, structures, styles, and plant types can all not only give you a valid inspiration for what you want to accomplish, but it also allows you to present everything you have in your mind out on paper so you can see the full picture. This makes it easy to envision what you’re planning to do with your front or back yard, and it allows you to confirm if certain styles, colors, or layouts truly work when they are put together. A vision board is a great tip to help you reach your custom landscape goals.
3. Set Your Budget
When dreaming up what you want your new landscaping to look like, it can definitely be easy to get carried away. We all know that walking into a greenhouse or nursery when you’re daydreaming can be hazardous to the health of your bank account if you don’t plan ahead. So, before you go too overboard, take your inspirations, and start researching costs. At least getting an idea of what each new design aspect costs can keep your goal design inline with your budget. If you can give yourself a set number for how much you’d like to spend for a new landscape next year, you can keep your imagination in that lane and focused.
4. Plan for Growth and Plant Accordingly
After starting your inspirations and taking notes, then setting a relative budget, you can then move along to what brings the concept of planting into the mix. It’s important to keep in mind the scalability of your desired yard and plan for the growth of specific elements of your landscape accordingly. While you might be eager to just plan for every inch of open space in your garden or walkway, it’s recommended that you stick to the planting guide that takes growth into consideration. Not only will you have room for growth in your new yard, you’ll also be able to increase the life and well-being of your plants exponentially by sticking to a plan. This is precisely what Bella Giardino Landscape and Garden Design consults on when we initially receive a new project. Be efficient by thinking ahead!
5. Mow to Promote Lawn Health
It’s also essential to prepare your foundation for a new yard. We all know by now that you always want to mow your lawn when it’s dry and not damp/wet outside to keep your lawn healthy. In addition, you want to ensure that you are not mowing the grass shorter than 2.5 inches to avoid completely killing it off, which provides the grass and ground with more insulation to fight the summer heat. Colorado Springs is experiencing quite a monsoon type summer right now, so while planning for next year’s landscape, be sure not to forget about the lawn you currently have and keep it maintained to stay alive.
6. Ensure Proper Irrigation
Another one of the landscaping tips for summer we have is to make sure your yard and plants are properly irrigated. Each week, you should water your lawn early in the morning several times a week, specifically somewhere around 5-6 a.m., so that your lawn can receive at minimum one inch of water per week. Of course, the timing can all depend on what Colorado Springs neighborhood you live in, and those particular HOA rules, if any, but generally speaking, those would be the basic guidelines we suggest. The reason you should be watering early in the day is so that there is less stress on the lawn from the hot summer sun. Watering late at night can cause fungus to grown overnight, so deep soaking will allow for deeper and better root growth while creating a lawn that is less susceptible to heat and drought damage. We can absolutely help with a new irrigation system with our local irrigation installation services, so feel free to call us for help too!
7. Be Sure to Fertilize
Do you ever wonder how your neighbor’s lawns keep that deep, lavish green color throughout the summer? It’s because they take care of their yard year-round, utilizing lawn care products that are high in nitrogen, which promotes that deep green color as well as growth. Although our summers include crazy afternoon showers, it’s important to also feed your lawn with the proper nutrients so that it can be well prepped for the landscape redesign you have planned for next year. It’s always important to prepare and plan ahead so whatever changes you make to your lawn and yard; your new landscape has a perfect base to work off of.
8. Plan Pest Control
Pests in Colorado aren’t always a guarantee, especially during our summer months, but you still want to have a plan in place to prevent infestations in your lawn. A variety of lawn pests can lead to bothersome infestations that can also kill and destroy your current landscaping, so having a plan for controlling them is a huge tip for Colorado summers. We suggest figuring out what specific pests can be common to your area, or for the landscaping features you have, and creating a plan for pest control that also protects the pollinators for your future plans. Keeping pests at bay in the summer allows for a smoother luxury landscape installation the following year.
9. Watch for Weeds
Although weeds are not insects, they can still be considered pests and be a very disruptive aspect to your landscaping. Not only can weeds be unsightly, but they can also steal nutrients and moisture from your yard’s grass and other plants, compromising everything you’ve been working so hard for. In addition, it can hinder the quality of your soil overtime, also impacting the success of any upcoming design installations. So, don’t only keep an eye out for pests and remove them as you see them, also be sure to pre-emptively kill weeds before your next garden bed or element is installed. This can allow you to start with a weed-free foundation for next year’s dream luxury landscape!
These are just a few helpful landscaping tips for Summer 2021 to help you prepare for next year’s dream landscape. Just remember to have fun! Landscaping and gardening are both wonderful ways to enjoy the beautiful Colorado outdoors and add some natural beauty to the environment around your home. Pick your plants to accentuate the exterior of your home, choose structures that compliment your home’s style, and plan out the perfect design that fits your budget and you’ll be left with a long-lasting yard for years to come. Give Bella Giardino Landscape and Garden Design a call today to book your consultation for next year’s project to start your summer off right.
