Moving into your first home with an already established landscaped yard and garden can be a daunting situation. Follow these tips for a more eased gardening experience.
First-time Homebuyer
Imagine you’ve just bought your first home. You’ve made the minor repairs inside, moved your belongings in and now it’s time to take a look outside. You were lucky enough to find a home with a large landscaped lot. The challenge is inevitable: taking care of your first yard and garden. Follow these preliminary steps to ensure proper upkeep of your first landscaped yard and garden.
Assess the situation
If you are like most first-time homebuyers, the names and types of plants and shrubs of your new yard will be a mystery to you. You might be familiar with several of the plants or had them in your yard growing up, but the majority will remain unidentifiable. Now is the time to employ the skills of your friends and family. Take your parents or sibling on a tour of the yard, asking them to name the plants and flowers of which they are familiar. Also, it is important to check to see if the previous owners have left the tags on the plants. If you look at the base of the plant, you may find an identification tag, including the name of the plant and other valuable information. Make sure to search the yard for these valuable tags. If possible, make a list of the plants you have identified throughout the yard, perhaps making a map of the yard for future reference.
Get more information
Buy a landscape or gardening book. Make sure it is written particularly for your region or climate. Sunset’s Western Garden Book is one of the best-known and easiest references to use for gardens in the Western states, or try the American Horticultural Society’s many guides and plant encyclopedias. An illustrated guide can be very useful in identifying plants and flowers, for first-time gardeners. You can find used gardening books at second hand stores, at Amazon.com or even loan one from your local library. The Internet is also a handy tool for looking up specific plant information.
Begin with yard maintenance
Before the yard and garden gets out of hand, make sure to do some yard maintenance. Weeding out grass from flower beds and gardens is one of the most important steps in keeping the yard under control. If grass continues to grow throughout the spring and summer, it will engulf the smaller plants, even killing ground cover. Make sure to keep the grass and weeds out of the beds. Another important tip to keep the plants watered. Even if you haven’t identified every specimen of the yard, make sure they get enough water during the warm months. If plants dry out, they may die before you get a chance to properly identify them. Make sure to provide for their basic needs. Other simple maintenance can include deadheading roses, cutting off dead rose blooms after they have turned brown. This will stimulate the rose bush to produce more blooms, even extending its blooming season into the late summer or autumn months.
