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Articles & Books From Lance Walheim
Create an eye-catching outdoor oasis with this no-nonsense guide to landscaping As families spend more time at home, they're expanding their living space to their yards, decks, and patios. When you're ready to upgrade the look of your landscape, Landscaping For Dummies offers advice on installing fences and walkways, choosing hardy plants and trees, and enhancing natural habitats for the critters and creatures lurking in your neighborhood.
Cheat Sheet / Updated 03-08-2022
Putting together your perfect landscape starts with making a wish list customized to your needs, planning out your landscaping, and purchasing plants best suited for your landscape plan and hardiness zone. This Cheat Sheet can help you keep track of these details.Creating a landscaping wish listMake a wish list when you begin landscape planning and use your imagination to customize it around your needs.
Cheat Sheet / Updated 02-07-2023
Growing your garden requires the aid and cooperation of many forces including the climate in your hardiness zone; insects, good and bad; fertilizers; and soil amendments.Decorative material (such as mulch, stone, sand, and gravel) adds a nice finish, so know how much you need to buy. Adapting each element to your garden's needs — as best you can — leads to a successful gardening experience.
Step by Step / Updated 03-27-2016
Laying sod is a gratifying experience—you get a new, green lawn in no time! The time to lay sod is early morning before it gets too hot. The soil in the planting area should be moist, not soggy or dry. Water thoroughly one or two days before the sod is delivered so that the top several inches of soil are wetted.
Step by Step / Updated 03-27-2016
Growing perennials from seed gives you the chance to start literally hundreds of plants from one package of seeds. Most perennial seeds don’t germinate very successfully when planted outside. By starting the seeds indoors, you can create an artificial environment to meet their needs.
You can grow perennials indoors any time of the year.
Article / Updated 03-26-2016
Connecting your lawn irrigation system to the plumbing system in your house is one of the final steps of installation. The water for your lawn irrigation system has to come from somewhere, so you need to hook your system to the house water supply.
Tapping into the water supply is one part of the installation that you should really get help on from a professional installer or plumber.
Article / Updated 03-26-2016
You must use lawn herbicides carefully. Most of these products kill desirable plants as well as weeds. For example, tree roots and shrubs growing near the lawn can absorb some herbicides, such as dicamba (a systemic herbicide effective against broadleafed weeds). The dicamba can kill the trees and shrubs just as effectively as the weeds.
Article / Updated 03-26-2016
Here’s the cold, hard truth about lawn diseases — most are very difficult to identify properly. Lawn diseases are hard to tell apart and easy to confuse with other problems, such as insect damage and even simple physical maladies like fertilizer burn. If you can’t identify the disease, you’ll have a hard time fixing it.
Article / Updated 03-26-2016
Before you put in a new lawn you need to level and grade the space. If your ground is relatively level, gently sloped, and has no major impediments like huge boulders, you probably can grade your lawn yourself.
The tools you need for soil grading are simple. First, because you may need to haul soil from a higher spot to a lower spot, make sure that you have a wheelbarrow and shovel.
Article / Updated 03-26-2016
Face it. Dry climates, such as the desert Southwest, and the amount of water that a lawn needs make having a lawn out of the question for some people. Here are some more usable or low-maintenance alternatives:
Plant ground covers: Ground covers are usually low-growing, often spreading plants that form a uniform layer of foliage when planted close together.