Gardening & Landscaping
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Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
First house... first garden and yard!
FI and I are going to close on our first house in just over a week. The whole yard needs to be reseeded after drainage gets put in. As soon as it rains the grass turns to mud. The yard will be FI's job. Mine is going to be the garden.
There won't be any garden in the back (the yard is mostly on the side and front of the house, but there is room for a decent garden or two on one side and in the front. The house faces east and will get a lot of sun the first half of the day.
What do you suggest to plant for someone who has never done a garden before? TIA
Re: First house... first garden and yard!
Congrats on the new home!
Check out the Better Homes and Garden website. They have lots of free garden plans for all kinds of situations.
I'd also recommend planting some shrubs this year if you're starting with a blank slate. Get some dwarf or other small variety that won't ever have to be prunned down to size. They look great all year round, add another dimension to your flower bed, and are very low maintanence. But they can take a while to be fully grown so plant them right away once you have a basic plan figured out.
Go to your local library. They have lots of gardening books with plant ideas specific to your area.
Good luck!
As a fairly new homeowner as well, about 10 months, I was very excited to get going on the gardening also. But after seeing the overwhelming amount of things I could do, and not having any experience with gardening we decided to wait on that. Concentrating mostly on care of the existing lawn. Now Spring is coming up and I have a much clearer idea of what we want to do in terms of flowering shrubs and plants. We've also had the chance to see what the sun exposure is like throughout the year.
Check out Amazon for deals on gardening and landscaping books for your zone.
What kind of gardening are you talking about? Ornamental? Edible? Both?
Personally, I would wait until you've been in the house for an entire year before doing any sort of dramatic gardening (like putting in raised beds or investing in $$ plants). I think it's worth it to take the time to do research and get to know your yard...how much sun it gets, what the soil is like, are there drainage issues, etc?
In my blog (link in sig) under the book tab I've got recs for edible gardening books.
If you want to get your hands dirty, I would consider buying & planting some annuals (these are cheap & provide great color w/out commitment) and, if so inclined, put some veg or herbs in pots (so you can move around if the sun situaiton isn't right as the seasons go on).
I should say that I dropped several hundred dollars on plants for my yard shortly after we moved in. I didn't understand our soil (compact, not-draining soil) or the light situation (part of the yard is full sun during winter & full shade during summer thanks to trees leafed out & the different angle of the sun). Don't make my mistake!
Good luck & have fun!