Things Not to Do When Landscaping Your Garden
June 16th, 2008
Landscaping your garden is somewhat subjective; one person’s paradise could be seen as another person’s unkempt allotment! But there are some landscaping faux pas you should avoid for the health and vitality of your garden.
Many households are guilty of overwatering, especially those people with timed sprinklers, set to go off night. You should always remember that grass needs time to dry, so the best time for sprinklers is early morning. If the grass blades are not allowed the time to dry out, fungal diseases are more likely to occur. Also trees need less water than grass (about an inch of water a week), so make sure that the sprinklers aren’t aimed at the trees.
Topiary spheres are also a landscaping faux pas. They may look nice in you front garden, or backyard, but it does do irreparable damage to the shrub. Sunlight cannot get to new growth in these topiary spheres and the undergrowth will die as a result. On the other hand, landscapers do recommend that you do prune the shrub to maintain its natural shape and get rid of dead branches.
Another common landscaping feature actually strangles the tree! If you have raised beds around your favorite tree in the garden then you are setting the stage for a dead tree at sometime in the future. The slow deterioration of the tree is usually put down to other reasons, but it is actually slowly being strangled to death by the raised bed around it.
Lastly a recent landscaping debate is the use of rubber mulch. There are no rights or wrongs here, but rubber mulch does not need replacing so much and looks good all year around and other organic mulches don’t last as long, can end up with insect infestations, smell and they do give your plants fungal infections.
