Careful planning before starting your home & landscaping improvements will pay off in the long run and give you years of enjoyment whether you've just moved into a newly built house on a bare lot, or want to enhance your existing home.

The first step in planning is to consider the size, location and structure of your house & property, and the social & recreational needs of your family:

• If you have a lot of street traffic, consider hedges planted along the street line to help muffle noises and block headlight glare at night.
• If you have small children and want a play area with swings & sandbox, etc., consider an area that is fully visible from inside the house, is away from the street and driveway, and just as important, a partially shady spot to keep them safe from the sun's harmful rays.
• Landscape around challenge areas to enhanced them. A deeply sloped bank where nothing wants to grow could be a perfect spot for a rock garden.
• Vegetable gardens need 6 hours of direct sunlight so don't plan on the north side of the house or the shady side of a large tree.
• If a pond is desired, locate it in a partly shady area but not directly under a tree where fall leaves can drop in it.

The next step is to draw your planned features on a piece of graph paper, trying to keep it in scale (grab a tape measure and go size your space). Sketch the outline of the property and existing non-removable structures including the house, garage, & sheds(s). Separately, draw up some cutout representations for fences, ponds, play area, new sheds, path or walkways, again to scale. This will allow you to further visualize your plans and enable you to see at a glance anything that won't fit as you might have thought. Move the pieces around until you have found the perfect arrangement. This method is handy for arranging furnishings inside the house too.

When planning the arrangment of your plantings or flower beds, keep in mind how they will affect your ability to mow the lawn. Attractive grouping of plants is important for the overall effect such as complimentary color themes, mixed sizes of plants with the tallest at the back and smaller plants bordering the edges, and transitional effects of mixing different plant types such as low evergreen shrubs surrounded by spring bulbs.

Researching & budgeting your landscaping materials is a vital step in planning. Many plans are thought up when Spring arrives and the urge to rush out and buy everything is quite strong. Most stores sell landscaping supplies at premium prices at this time of year.

• Flowering trees are more expensive when they are in bloom.
• Walkways and retaining walls made of bricks or stones usually require a large quantity of them and a few cents saved per stone can make a big difference in the total cost.
• Ponds require the correct pump to effectively move water through filtration & fountain system according to the ponds size and depth.

The sequence when actually starting the landscaping work is to build any raised planting beds & borders, setup water feature hoses or liners located in ground, then plant trees & shrubs, build walks and driveways, and finally seed lawns and flower beds.

If you have any landscape planning tips, please share them with us on the Community Forum.