DIY Gardening Tips

submitted: Jul 2nd 2008 | by: Admin | Total views: 438 | Word Count: 624 | |

You have a lot of options if you want to use a garden to improve the look of your yard. It's plain to see that a well manicured lawn drastically improves the appeal and aesthetic quality of any neighborhood.

You may have a messy neighbor or two who care nothing for their yards—having a superb garden of your own could easily offset the look of those shabby lawns. You have a lot of choices when making your garden, but one of the easiest options is a rock garden.

This is a kind of garden which emphasizes stones and rocks with several smaller plants naturally found in rocky areas. These plants are usually less emphasized, but they're essential in the aesthetics of the garden.

Since these plants are naturally found in rocky areas, they are often small and prefer a drier soil than many plants do, but even they can't lack water totally. There is a popular kind of rock garden in which the bedrock is arranged so that it appears that a bedding plane shifted.

Usually, you should arrange your plants to hide the joints in the stones, as opposed to a natural setting, where the rock would probably be one contiguous piece. This sort of professional design in the rock garden, called rockery, was quite popular in the Victorian era.

There is a Japanese rock garden, occasionally under the misnomer ‘Zen garden,' which is a simple sand box containing sand, rocks, and in some rare cases, grass. Often, the sand in this type of garden represents water, and rakes are used to create ridging symbolizing ripples therein.

Rocks, then, would be the islands. Some consider these soothing to the mind, but that was not their original intention. If you want to truly enhance your landscape, then you need to understand how to assemble an effective garden within your kind of terrain.

Even if you don't have any fertile soil, you can still improve your landscape with a good garden. Having flat land doesn't prevent you from bringing in rocks and making a rock garden. Almost any kind of terrain can sustain a rock garden.

If you're looking for that completely natural allure, then you need to research what sort of stones are native to the area you live in—before you start bringing them in for a rock garden. You should also focus on local plants to grow in the rock garden.

That little extra effort in the design and setup of your rock garden can mean the difference between just having a nice look and getting compliments from your neighbors and maybe even becoming the talk of the town!

It's easy to see that rock gardening may be a very low maintenance method of decorating your yard, considering that they're often shallow and, if you're including any plants at all, those plants need little water or other care.

Even just a little bit of upkeep every week—maybe as rarely as every month—may maintain your lawn decorations fabulously. After you select your rocks, ensure that the land you intend to use is free from debris.

Weeds are one thing you'll have to take care of. Rock gardens look best with low levels of vegetation, so weeds can present a problem if they're popping up all over the place. They'll have to be cleared out. Also, you may want to break up your scenery with a few piles of rocks here and there without any plants in them.

It could take some time and a little practice to ensure that you've got the proper balance between plants and rocks, but when you reach that balance—and you will—it can be very rewarding.

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