Is Landscaping Harder Near the Ocean?

Landscaping near the ocean is a bit more challenging than typical land cultivation. Gusty winds, higher humidity, and salt concentrations are some of the coastal climates that trouble seashore cultivators. 

Early Tips for Landscaping Near the Ocean

When these factors combine, they will destroy leaves and prevent plants from growing. But is it that difficult to give your seaside property a beautiful garden? No, it is not. Know about the effective solutions to overcome those challenges for attractive landscaping!

Choose sturdy and salt-resistant plants

To increase the oxidation, plants consume water from the ground through osmosis, a mechanism in which water travels from a position with low solute concentrations to one with high amounts. If the groundwater is very salty, it will draw water from the plants, causing them to suffer from water deficit.

Most common plants are susceptible to salt, which can hinder their development or even trigger them to droop and die if they are close to the seaside. It is better to indulge in salt-resistant plants while thinking of landscaping in your seashore property. These salt impenetrable plants not only can withstand salt, but they will also need less grooming and are drought tolerant. This makes it ideal if your home isn’t used (or maintained) all year.

Do proper planning for sunny and stormy weather

Storms and sunny weather are prevalent and known to all coastal residents. Oceanfront residences are built to withstand the necessary conditions since they are prone to more heat and storms than residences in farther offshore sites. 

Be sure to choose plants that will not only thrive in the sun (or dappled shade if they’re close to your house or cottages) but will also withstand solid gusty winds and excessive rains. This point is crucial to note down while going for landscaping. To protect the plants, go for better protection of the roots, give proper coverage, wrap-up plants in a reliable fabric, or use frost blankets. 

Plump for Gravel for excellent groundcovers

For oceanside landscapes, a mixture of gravel, broken rock, and sand works well as a groundcover. It can support drainage and can withstand the winds and other conditions without being damaged.

Use eco-friendly products and chemicals 

Usage of eco-friendly products and chemicals is the next step to organic landscaping. An organic approach maintains a cleaner and more productive soil, with well-balanced carbon and nitrogen cycles. The normal nitrogen fixation in the soil also enhances due to the massive preservation of healthy microbes. Moreover, organic plantation aids in pollution control. 

Since you live near the sea and experience higher rainfall, it’s important to prepare ahead to prevent your home’s drainage from polluting the ocean and other habitats such as local wetlands. To help prevent disrupting the natural environment, environmentally friendly products are a must during landscaping. Consider building wetlands or other drainage conservation areas for better results. 

Early preparation for preventing soil erosion

Soil erosion is one of the scariest things during cultivation. It leads to degradation in soil quality and increases in soil acidity levels. Further, it affects the drainage, future plant growth, eventually polluting the water. For oceanfront lands, soil erosion is one of the major issues. 

Dwellings constructed near the ocean are especially susceptible to this condition. A mixture of native plants, concrete blocks, terraces, and other landscaping elements can help regulate the home’s drainage and soil erosion.

Come up with alternatives for bright lighting

At times there is not enough sunlight for plants due to bad weather conditions near the ocean. It leads to a halt in the plant’s growth. Therefore, setting up artificial lighting beforehand is a must. And it is obvious to install proper lighting fixtures for bright lighting and better landscaping. 

For coastal regions, lighting fixtures that do not rust or deform when subjected to elevated moisture and alkalinity are needed. A typical metal pole encased in concrete can rot quickly, basically as soon as humidity penetrates the concrete strength and enters the metallic base. Before buying lighting fixtures, ensure that they are non-porous and non-hygroscopic. 

Always go for low-lying leaves

Low-lying plants offer you a great display of the sea view without causing problems. Simultaneously, it also preserves your gardening foliages while being neat and tidy. Vines, large-leaved plants, and soft flowers are all excellent choices for creating an environment that complements the natural beauty of living on the coast. 

Moreover, these plants can be easily handled, saving time and effort. Individuals who dream of beautiful and easy landscaping can make its best use. 

Stick to native plants

Rather than building a yard and a flowering plant greenhouse, choose native plants for marine landscapes. Native plants can quickly adapt to the local environmental conditions and offer food and shelter for local birds and animals. Furthermore, these plants are drought-tolerant and need less water.

Build windbreaks

When it comes to winds, you should minimize their impact on your plants’ production. The right approach to do this is to strategically place shrubs and trees to build windbreaks in the landscape. You can mix trees and shrubs with a variety of things you have on your land to create windbreaks. You can also use walls and displays for the same. However, make sure there is enough space between them to avoid turbulence.

Improve soil quality

Soil fertility is among the first issues you must tackle. If you live in coastal areas, the soil of your premises is certainly more alkaline. This necessitates the inclusion of organic matter as well as wetting agents to improve soil consistency. It will further increase the soil’s composition as well as its water-holding capability. 

Be sure to dig organic material into the ground rather than just spreading it on the surface of the soil when applying it. As a result, there would be stunted growth of weeds.

Takeaway

A residence by the shore can be a beautiful thing to have, whether you live there full-time or only visit during the holidays. Instead of embracing your destiny as a coastline property owner and being accustomed to it, you should take these few steps to fulfill your dream of creating a stunning seashore landscape. 

Coastal Landscaping is not that difficult. However, it requires greater attention than regular plantations. If you do not follow proper plantation habits, you may not have the best landscaping experience. Explore more landscaping ideas from Tea Lane Nursery. The teams are landscaping experts who can offer the best designing experiences.

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What Is The Purpose of Landscaping?

One of the most important driving forces behind good landscaping is that it promotes a marriage between all the physical features of your residence, with the natural features of the surroundings. For landscaping professionals like those at Tea Lane Nursery, this can be a challenge, but being aware of the underlying objective makes it somewhat more achievable. Those homeowners who lack this understanding are operating on pure instinct and what looks and feels right to them. 

This is not to say that the average homeowner doesn’t achieve some sparkling successes with landscaping – many do, in fact. Really good landscaping isn’t just about choosing big, beautiful plants which are colorful and attractive, because it also involves incorporating the elements of your household into the total setting provided by nature. For instance, landscaping can make your walkway, your pool, or your shed seem like part of the environment, while still showing off their own distinctive features and benefits. Here’s how to go about using good landscape design.

Consider the surroundings 

The first thing you need to do is to identify all those features about your environment which will have an impact on your landscape design. Anything in the way of fences, pools, decks, porches, outbuildings, walkways, and even bodies of water should be noted. Next, consider how much sunlight the entire area receives, and at what time of day the sun strikes those areas.

This will be important for choosing the kinds of plants you want to install around the home. Another factor which will impact your plant selection is the type of soil which prevails around your residence. It might be primarily sandy or have a higher clay content, and it might retain water well or it might drain off well, and this will be important for your plant life.

Lastly, consider exactly which kinds of activities you expect to carry out in each of the areas you intend to landscape. For instance, will you be inviting friends over for gatherings at the deck in your backyard? Will there be very few activities in your front yard, other than gardening and mowing the lawn? You’ll need to know how much traffic will be affecting each of the areas you’re working with, and how active that traffic will be.

Points to keep in mind 

Given the fact that there should be a flow to the outdoor scenery just as there is to your interior decor, you should attempt to incorporate that flow into the landscape design, in order to create a harmonious relationship between dwelling and land. Your finished landscape design should be pleasing to look at from any point of view inside your home, and from outdoors as well.

To accomplish this, incorporate the principles of unity, simplicity, and proportion. One trick to remember is to try and install several focal points in your landscape design, because these will draw the attention of the viewer toward features you wish to emphasize. You can also be very creative while carrying out the marriage between house and environment, choosing plants which thrive in your climate and your specific sun/moisture setting.

When developing your landscape design, you can consciously choose to favor one element over the other – more natural, or more house-centered. Current trends are in the direction of allowing nature the upper hand, but that doesn’t mean nature needs to dominate your home and push it to the background. If you wish to strike a perfect balance between dwelling and nature, that may be the easiest arrangement to achieve, because neither component will appear to have precedence. 

The final product 

Ultimately, the landscaping arrangement you come up with should be something which is pleasing to your eye, and which others find appealing as well. Many homeowners spend the most time on developing their front yard landscape plan, because it’s the area which is most visible to the public, and it says the most about the personality of the designer.

If this is true in your case as well, make sure that your front yard design makes good use of whatever features might be visible, like your walkway, your garden, a strategically placed boulder, or even your mailbox. Assemble a collection of plants which complements your house, and which are colorful and attractive in a way that flatters your premises.

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Benefits of Organic Landscaping

If you’ve heard anything about organic landscaping, you may be under the impression that it’s very costly and time-consuming, and not worth the effort. In actual fact however, the benefits gained from an organic landscaping approach are far more important than the initial cost of getting started, and those benefits make it totally worthwhile to undertake this alternative approach to landscaping the area around your home. Before delving into just what those benefits are, we should clearly define what is meant by organic landscaping.

Without getting into the technical aspects of it, organic landscaping can be considered the practice of creating and maintaining naturally-sustaining systems wherein soil and plant nutrition, as well as plant health, become the natural by-products of a chemical-free management program. That’s quite a mouthful, isn’t it? What it means is that an approach to landscaping is adopted so as to contribute significantly to the health of all plants around your home, without using any kind of chemicals to achieve that status of good health. For instance, fertilizing your garden with manure or compost rather than bagged fertilizer from a garden shop might be one component of your organic landscaping program.

Environment-friendly

As you might guess, an organic approach to landscaping will be much more friendly to the environment than any other approach. Many traditional methods can include toxic chemicals, and these can easily end up in water supplies and in the soil around your residence. There are all kinds of cases where people have been harmed by ingesting these toxins without even realizing it. On the other hand, there are no toxins at all included in the organic approach, so people are not harmed, nor is the environment itself.

Air quality

Any toxins which get introduced to the environment through traditional landscaping can also find their way into the air supply in your home and the immediate surroundings, potentially causing problems for wildlife in the area and to occupants of your home. Anyone who has a respiratory issue in your household might end up being troubled by these toxins which have been released into the breathing air. Since there are no harmful chemicals used in organic landscaping, none of your family members will be bothered, nor will any wildlife in the area.

Healthier root systems

When you decide to take the organic approach, it will contribute to developing healthier root systems for all those plants which you’re growing around the home. You can expect anything you grow to become greener and healthier over the long term, and that will enhance their natural beauty because they are enjoying better health. You will pretty much always obtain the best growing and gardening results when you use natural fertilizers to help your plants grow better.

Healthier soil

In addition to making your plants healthier from the ground up, using all-natural fertilizers will help improve the overall health of the soil itself. Soil which is treated with all-natural ingredients will usually be able to remain looser and less compacted, and it will also generally retain moisture better. That will make it easier to work with, and it will contribute significantly to the ongoing health of the soil, which means it will be better able to support anything you want to grow.

Marhtas Vineyard Organic Landscaping

Inexpensive

While it might seem to be more costly than traditional landscaping methods, organic landscaping can actually work out to be less expensive in the long run. Whatever extra money you have to invest to obtain all-natural ingredients will be a good investment, because those ingredients will last longer and be more effective in the soil, once they’ve been effectively introduced. You won’t have to work as hard to maintain your garden or your lawn, so you’ll also save a bit of time and effort once your program is fully underway. By making use of high-quality natural ingredients in your yard, the money you invest will last considerably longer, and you’ll end up paying less over a period of time. To summarize, adopting an organic landscaping approach will be healthier for the soil, your plants, the environment, and all your family members as well, so you should consider engaging the services of a professional organic landscaper to obtain all these benefits.

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3 Reasons to Hire Professional Landscapers

Did you know that almost 90% of all real estate agents advise that their clients invest in landscaping their yards prior to selling their homes? That’s a lot to take on; however, if you already have professional landscaping services taking care of your lawn, you will be one step ahead of the game when you go to sell.

That’s not the only reason to hire professional landscaping services to take care of your yard. Read on below for a few of the top reasons you might want to have your landscape design handled by the landscape experts.

To Save You Time

One of the main reasons that you might want to have a landscape contractor take care of your yard is to save you time. You want to be able to enjoy your yard, not be a slave to taking care of it. If you have a job, social obligations, and a family, the last thing you want to be doing is yard work or landscape design when you’re off of work. The best way to avoid that is by having a reputable landscaping service take care of the lawn for you.

To Increase Your Home’s Curb Appeal

Landscaping services work great to increase the curb appeal of your home. No one in the neighborhood wants their neighbor’s yard to bring down the value of the neighborhood itself. Having your landscape professionally maintained is the perfect way to ensure that everything looks great in your yard. After all, who doesn’t want to be the talk of the neighborhood for having the best-landscaped yard around?

To Save You Money

When you try to do your own landscaping for your home, it’s easy to end up spending a ton of money that you don’t really have. You have to buy all of the equipment needed and learn how to use it as well. Remember, landscaping companies are experts in landscaping, so they have the equipment and the know-how to use it the right way. If you hire the local kid down the street instead, and he messes up something, then you’re going to have to take the money to hire the professionals to do it anyway, now aren’t you?

These are just a few of the top reasons you might want to consider hiring a professional landscaping service to take care of your landscaping for you. From saving you time to saving you money, and then increasing the curb appeal of your home as a bonus, professional landscaping not only makes good common sense but good financial sense as well.

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The Role of a Landscape Contractor

landscape contractors

People seek out landscape contractors for various reasons, but whether you are looking to increase the resale value of your house or you just want to give your home a spruce up, hiring a landscape company is the right way to go. Landscaping can increase your home value by a whopping 14%. If you invest as little as 5% of your home’s value to improve the landscape, your efforts can yield a return on investment of as much as 150%. Before we get to hiring landscape contractors, let us first understand what their role is.

What Does a Landscape Contractor Do?

This term is used to refer to a professional whose area of expertise is in planning, designing, and preservation of land through refurbishing your outdoor. A constructor can do this by planting trees, flowers, shrubs, and lawns mostly around the house or in any man-made construction. The public sector hires a lot of landscapers, but some independent professionals offer services in the private sector in areas such as homes, gardens and golf courses.

To make an outdoor space worth living in, landscape professionals use soft materials such as shrubs and other living plants, as well as hard materials such as footbridges and other man-made structures. If you are thinking of designing an indoor landscape, a designer will be available once you get in touch with a contractor and share your vision.

Some landscape contractors are also architects and have the technical know-how of what is involved in the construction of a building. But, in today’s post, let us take an in-depth look at the role a landscape contractor will play.

  1. Designing beautiful outdoor living areas: Once you contact a landscape expert, they will give you advise on the landscape design that will meet your requirements. They will also show you how to best utilize the space they design, listen to your preferences and assess if the site can handle the work you need to be done. If you are not big on using fertilizers for your plants, the landscape expert will give you an option of using organic landscape design and how to care for them. Most of the service providers in this field also offer after service delivery at an extra fee, which keeps the headache of maintaining a garden or lawn off your shoulders so you can enjoy the space.
  2. Planning and contracting the area: Another crucial role of a landscape contractor is to prepare the materials they will use, work out the estimates and provide a tentative budget for you. They are also responsible for the logistics in the whole operation and creating schedules of how they will execute the work and deliver on time. If they decide to bring in subcontractors such as electricians, they will be responsible for hiring and firing and oversee the work done by the professionals they subcontract.
    Construction is one of the most vital parts of the company’s work. This is where all the technical skills are employed as the pros deal with the foundation work such as drainage and irrigation systems. They may also include a few slopes and terraces creating special features that make your garden stand out. Centerpieces such as ponds, fountains, and rock gardens are also constructed and paths and patios installed.
  3. Planting the garden: This is the fun part of landscape contractors work. Planting brings the garden to life and brings in the fresh air and tranquilizing look you are looking for. Using the shrubs, trees, and flowers you agreed on, the landscaping designer will rework the soil and move things around to create an entirely new space that meets your vision. To maintain the beauty of the spaces created, contractors advocate for maintenance programs. It’s a shame to create a space and watch it go to waste due to lack of proper maintenance.Now that you know what a landscape designer will do for your space, go ahead and look around at some professionals who create the kind of space you have in mind.Designing beautiful outdoor living areas: Once you contact a landscape expert, they will give you advise on the landscape design that will meet your requirements. They will also show you how to best utilize the space they design, listen to your preferences and assess if the site can handle the work you need to be done. If you are not big on using fertilizers for your plants, the landscape expert will give you an option of using organic landscape design and how to care for them. Most of the service providers in this field also offer after service delivery at an extra fee, which keeps the headache of maintaining a garden or lawn off your shoulders so you can enjoy the space.
  4. Planning and contracting the area: Another crucial role of a landscape contractor is to prepare the materials they will use, work out the estimates and provide a tentative budget for you. They are also responsible for the logistics in the whole operation and creating schedules of how they will execute the work and deliver on time. If they decide to bring in subcontractors such as electricians, they will be responsible for hiring and firing and oversee the work done by the professionals they subcontract.
    Construction is one of the most vital parts of the company’s work. This is where all the technical skills are employed as the pros deal with the foundation work such as drainage and irrigation systems. They may also include a few slopes and terraces creating special features that make your garden stand out. Centerpieces such as ponds, fountains, and rock gardens are also constructed and paths and patios installed.
  5. Planting the garden: This is the fun part of landscape contractors work. Planting brings the garden to life and brings in the fresh air and tranquilizing look you are looking for. Using the shrubs, trees, and flowers you agreed on, the landscaping designer will rework the soil and move things around to create an entirely new space that meets your vision. To maintain the beauty of the spaces created, contractors advocate for maintenance programs. It’s a shame to create a space and watch it go to waste due to lack of proper maintenance.

Now that you know what a landscape designer will do for your space, go ahead and look around at some professionals who create the kind of space you have in mind.

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