With the days getting bigger and warmer, your garden is starting to require higher maintenance. Spring is the time of the year when your year-long efforts pay off, but it is also the time of the year when your landscape needs your pair of hands the most. While you may not necessarily enjoy all the planning, planting, harvesting, mowing, the heat and the hours spent on landscaping work, you still need to keep up with all your landscaping tasks in order to have the beautiful and healthy yard you want.

As with anything else in life, we all make mistakes and then try to learn our lessons from them. With landscaping, it’s not different at all. Even the most experienced gardeners make some rookie mistakes multiple times, but the important thing is to always learn something from these errors. Benjamin Franklin once said “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of care” and it seems like he had exactly landscaping in mind. So before you put your gardening gloves on and get to work, there are a few common landscaping mistakes many landscapers do in spring that you should be well aware of and avoid them. These rookie mistakes could turn out to be fatal both for your health and curb appeal of your garden, so you need to make sure you won’t do any of them.

Mistake 1: Planting Without a Plan

Piecing together a landscape by combining your favorite plants and decorative objects is not the way to build your landscape. It’s easy to lose your head for a bit and start your landscape project without taking your time to prepare a detailed plan. This is the most common mistakes landscapers make, especially in spring when the cold winter days are past and landscapers are eager to add new plants. Although being ambitious and working hard is necessary, the first step is making a plan. Without a plan, you are very likely to run into all sorts of issues with space, colors, design, flow, order and appearance.

Mistake 2: Planting Too Close To Each Other

While planting in the wrong place was once a common landscaping mistake, it seems like landscapers have finally learned that plants’ health and growth depend on getting proper sunlight. But here’s the new problem: planting too close to each other. Planting is delicate stuff and it requires a lot of consideration put into. Each plant requires some space to grow properly. If they are close to each other or crowded by (unnecessary) weeds, their growth may stop and never continue. Make sure they have enough room to spread, regardless of how much space looks unused. In up to three years, you’ll see how that seemingly unused space will burst into big, healthy plants that will add a variety of colors and scents.

Mistake 3: Cutting the Grass Too Short

You’ve probably heard that cutting the grass too short reduces the frequency of mowing. The truth is, it doesn’t. After cold winter days, your grass does indeed need mowing, but not any different sort of mowing than usually. You may be inclined to cut it shorter because it’s longer now, but that’s exactly the mistake you want to avoid. By cutting your lawn too short, you may end up with dead spots of grass all over your yard and we all know how ugly that can look.

Mistake 4: Failing to Fertilize Properly

Whether by adding too little or too much, you can easily go wrong with fertilizing in spring and kill the grass, as both are among the most common landscaping mistakes. Achieving the perfect balance of fertilizers is the key to healthy and beautiful plants. The hard way to finding the right amount of fertilizers for your plants is to become an expert yourself by reading a lot of books on landscaping. But not many would choose the hard over the easy way, which is hiring a landscaping expert. Thanks to their vast of experience, they will know the right fertilizer for your plant by a brief look.

Mistake 5: Adding Too Much of Your Favorite Plants

There are a hundred of subtle ways to suggest what your favorite plant is and adding too much of it in your yard ain’t one. Planting too much of only one plant is a sure way of creating a dull, monotonous, one-colored yard that as soon as the summer ends will turn even duller and more monotonous. Without creating a natural variety, your garden will be dull in all four seasons except the one when your favorite plant blooms (oh, the thrill). To make the most out of your yard, add various colors, sizes and shapes of plants that bloom in different seasons to have a real visual treat all year long.

Mistake 6: Trying to Save on Quality Landscape Materials

Trying to save on quality landscape materials for the yard you’re working so hard on is a rookie mistake, because experienced landscapers have learned the hard way that the more you put into it, the more you get out of it. Soil, aggregates, firewood and mulch are some of the most essential landscaping materials, as they are the key elements of a visually attractive and functional yard. The tricky part with landscape materials is calculating the right amount you need for your project. You will either end up with too much of the same material and not knowing where to store it or get back to the store to get more.

Having a well-maintained, stunning garden does not have to be overwhelming. If you can’t seem to find the way to avoid these 6 mistakes, give the professionals at Sunset Landscaping a call and they will make sure all things in your garden are neat, tidy and taken care of. Whether you need quality landscape materials or other landscaping services, call us today for a free estimate of your landscape.