Becoming a Landscaping Contractor can be a very profitable and rewarding way to work for yourself and manage your financial future. Organization and planning are the key to any landscaping business and must be maintained throughout it’s life is to be successful. A service business like landscaping is one of the easiest to start up and has the best chance of success. By tending to the landscaping needs of your clients and understanding landscape design you can grow your landscaping company into a very profitable endeavor.

Estimated Start up Costs:

The costs of a landscaping business start up are relatively low but they increase with the level of services you intend to offer. Essential to your start up will be: a truck or trailer of some sort capable of hauling your tools and equipment to client locations; a lawnmower and weed eater; a rake and broom; a cell phone; and a computer to help with invoices, bookkeeping, and marketing; understanding front yard landscape design and hand tools will all be needed to get your business started. Not including the truck or trailer, a person could reasonably finance a landscaping business start up for less than $1,500.

Pricing Guidelines:

Pricing definitely is dependent upon the range of services offered and how desperate you are to break into the market. A reputable Landscaping Contractor can reasonably expect to command anywhere from $25 per hour and up for residential services. Sometimes you will be forced to bid on entire projects and pricing depends on the level of expertise needed to complete the project.  This is one reason the study of landscape design can help you demand top dollar and possibly land you large jobs.

Marketing tips:

The most advisable strategy would be to begin with residential accounts and build up a good reputation. To do this, word-of-mouth advertising will be key to the growth of your landscaping business start up. In addition, farming local neighborhoods, contacting local Realtors or builders and online advertising are the best ways to get started at minimal costs.

All in all, with some diligence and hard work, you can build a nice business and be your own boss.  The more experience and knowledge you gain the more opportunities will present themselves.

Regardless of whether you are just venturing out into the business world or already have a successful company, budgeting your expenses will help to improve profits and the overall health of the business. The largest expenses that a landscaping business has are advertising and the cost of equipment. The prices associated with a print advertisement can be significant, which is why a growing number of business owners are turning toward an alternative way of spreading the word about their landscaping business. With a company that provides local services, such as landscaping, it is more important to reach a local audience as opposed to a national one.

The most common way to generate free publicity for a landscaping business is through a press release, which is distributed to local newspapers, magazines and trade publications. Whether the landscaping business has an actual storefront present, is home or web-based, this option may have a positive success rate. In order for a press release to be worthy of publication, it must feature some type of news. A terrific example would be a grand opening, the launch of a new website, a free landscaping project contest or similar newsworthy event. A photograph of the business owner would make a nice accompaniment to any press release and may even grab the editor’s attention. Press releases can be submitted via mail, e-mail or fax and should be directed to the editor’s attention.

Many businesses, including those that provide landscaping services, often choose to have a website. Although the internet does provide for national exposure, many local customers may surf the web for landscaping information. A website should be professionally designed, regularly updated and feature plenty of landscaping example photos to showcase your ability. With a website, the free promotional opportunities are unlimited. From press release submission websites to article marketing and search engines, there are plenty of ways to get the word out about your new web presence.

Just as there are a number of ways to generate paid advertising, there are even more ways to obtain free publicity for your landscaping business. Most local companies will find paid advertising works most effectively in the telephone book’s yellow pages, but may also find limited success with newspaper and/or radio advertising. The main problem with the latter is that newspapers are often discarded quickly and most people do not have a pen handy when listening to the radio in order to write down a contact number. When you reduce the advertising costs and increase profits, your company’s bank account will begin to glimmer just as much as the dew on a beautifully landscaped lawn.

Landscaping has often been likened to the painting of a picture. Your art-work teacher has doubtless told you that a good picture should have a point of chief interest, and the rest of the points simply go to make more beautiful the central idea, or to form a fine setting for it. So in landscaping there must be in the gardener’s mind a picture of what he desires the whole to be when he completes his landscaping project.

Should you include lots of bare open lawn in your landscaping theme? A large extent of open lusious green lawn space is always beautiful. It is restful.

This type of open landscaping adds a feeling of space to even small grounds. If you cover your lawn space with many trees, with little flower beds here and there, the general effect is choppy and fussy. A bit like an over-dressed person. Not the most visual appealing result from your landscaping efforts.

When front yard landscaping, a single tree or a small group is not a bad arrangement on the lawn. Do not centre the tree or trees. Let them drop a bit into the background. Make a pleasing side feature of them. In choosing trees for your landscaping project, keep in mind a number of things. You should not choose an overpowering tree. The tree should have a good shape, with something interesting about its bark, leaves, flowers or fruit.

For the beauty of landscaping, the catalpa is quite lovely by itself. Its leaves are broad, its flowers attractive, the seed pods which cling to the tree until way into the winter, add a bit of picturesqueness. The bright berries of the ash, the brilliant foliage of the sugar maple, the blossoms of the tulip tree, the bark of the white birch, and the leaves of the copper beech all these are beauty points to consider when planning your overall landscaping arrangement.

Front Yard landscaping may follow along very formal lines or along informal lines. The first would have straight paths, straight rows in stiff beds, everything, as the name tells, perfectly formal. The other method is, of course, the exact opposite. You should consider the advantages and danger points in each.

In conclusion, plan for open lawn spaces in your overall front yard landscaping design and keep a visually appealing tree to blend in the background. Think balance and you will come up with a beautiful landscaping design for your yard.

I found a great article about front  yard landscaping that I wanted to share.

The first paragraph of the Landscaping Your Front Yard article starts out:

Each home and its landscape should be a reflection of the people who live there. The front yard is the visitor’s first impression of the home and its inhabitants. When first seen, it should be inviting and direct the guest easily to the front door. The purpose of this publication is not to be a formula for the development of the front yard, but rather a guideline to planning and making choices, along with an explanation of the basic principles involved in designing a landscape. Drawings are included to illustrate concepts but are not to be interpreted as exact designs to be copied.

Read the rest of the Front Yard Landscaping Article.  I think it will help.

As always if you are planning on doing your own landscaping, I have some recomendations that you might want to consider located on the top right hand corner of this website.

Happy landscaping!

There are a number of ways to enhance your home’s appearance, from smaller tasks such as weeding and mowing the lawn, to larger projects such as an exterior remodeling project.

It’s well known that potential buyers make up their minds in the first few minutes of seeing a home. How your home presents itself from the road can actually make or break the sale. You can make a world of difference in how your home is perceived by adding a boxwood hedge, painting the front door, or simply fertilizing and weeding the lawn.

It helps to write down a complete inventory of what is wrong with your home’s appearance, then make a list of ways in which you can fix those problems. It could be as simple as adding a flower bed or planting a tree. If your home lacks visual depth, installing a portico over your front door could be the solution. A walkway lined with bright flowers is always helpful. A good, old-fashioned paint job can give the home a face-lift, as well as new siding. If the roof looks dull, replacing the shingles can breathe new life into the house. View all repairs and improvements with the idea that you’ll make back your money three, five, or even ten times over with these tips.

The most important thing to keep in mind when preparing your house is to be objective. Look at your house and yard as if you were a buyer, and determine curb appeal from that perspective. You may notice things you’ve spent years overlooking. By spending a little time fixing up your house, you could potentially add thousands to the selling price.

Some tips that can be extremely useful in landscaping one’s front yard are:

• The yard should contain various plantations in the form of plants and trees. The trees and plants have a beauty of their own and give the yard a natural look and feel.
• The porch is also an important part of the front yard. The designing of that particular part of the yard should be done with great care.  The materials used on the porch should also be similar to the rest of the house and should not disturb the natural ambience.
• The maintenance of the sidewalk of the yard is also another important aspect as it enables the incoming and out going people to notice the beauty of the house in full effect.

Front Yard Gardens:

Front yard gardening is usually done to highlight the best features of your home and its front. Apart form keeping in mind how you want your front yard garden to look, there are also other considerations that you must go through. What most people fail to remember in their enthusiasm for beautifying their front yards is that the long-term effects have to be kept in mind before planting the shrubs and trees.

First of all you have to make sure that the plants you plan to plant have a good chance of survival. So, checking the amount of shade or sunlight, the kind of soil etc has to be checked before hand. You also have to be careful about the kind of plants you choose to plant near the foundation of the house. Choose plants whose roots are not likely to endanger the foundation of the house when fully mature. 

If you have a wide shadow of your home falling on your front yard, it is advised to plant small shrubs farther away form the house so as not to deprive them of sunlight and to protect them from the heat which would be reflected off the wall.

As a real estate broker and landscape enthusiast, I see all kinds of yards and meet all types of people.  I know some successful landscape business owners and I have met some that just don’t get it. 

Sometimes when I have clients looking at properties, I cringe when we arrive and the first thing we see is a lack of any landscape design or any landscaping at all.

Have you been scouring the Internet for landscape ideas?  If you allow it to happen all the terms and choices can be overwhelming.  As I have been writing blog posts about front yard landscape ideas, I have realized that choosing the best design for you can be daunting if you don’t simplify your choices.

Ever hear of the acronym KISS?  It means Keep it simple stupid.  I try to keep things simple in all that I do.  Landscaping is no different.  Trying to visualize what the end product will be without examples is impossible for me.  I need a guideline and examples.  Most people are more successful if they have examples or steps to follow.

For this reason I tell my clients and those starting a landscape business, that Landscape 4 home is a minimal investment for what you receive.

Christina Peterson is a professional landscaper and has created this fantastic landscape design product.

Here is a quote and guarantee from Christina: “You really don’t even have to think about it, though, because I’ll guarantee you’ll start creating landscape designs that are environmentally friendly, low maintenance and that will give you years of enjoyment….or you won’t owe me a dime”

Do yourself a favor and check it out.

Landscape Ideas For Your Home

Taking a drive around town will reveal yards that look the same. Sure some may have beautifully manicured lawns and others may not but the overall look is the same, green grass, trees and flowers. If you’re longing to make your yard stand out from the acres of sameness adding some decorative rocks and stones to your landscape design will do the trick.

The addition of landscaping rocks will give your yard a style and character that most homeowners would love to have but don’t know where to start. The first step to adding some personality to your landscaping is to remove some of the grass. If you aren’t using your front lawn there’s no point in maintaining it and this will make your landscape ideas unique.

Use a shovel or if you have access to one, use a tiller to break up the ground. Pull the rocks out of your way –these are not the kind of rocks we’ll be using for this landscaping project

While you’re digging, decide whether or not you have the proper drainage for your plants and flowers, if not, now would be a good time to add the appropriate irrigation system.

One addition that you can add to your front yard landscaping is to add a walkway. Having your guests use the driveway or worse, the grass, to get to your door is not ideal landscape design so think about adding a walkway. This addition will keep guests from tracking in dirt and other debris in to your home too.

One popular effect for a stone walkway is to stagger rocks all along the walk to your door. Make certain that when you do the final install your rocks are secure and they don’t move when they are walked on. To keep the rocks in place remove four to five inches of soil beneath each rock that you lay. Add a thin layer of gravel beneath the stone. This will keep your rocks and stones in place to ensure safety and stability.

When planning the walkway try to add interest by adding curves to your landscaping design. This will give your work a more distinctive yet informal look. Add smaller trees and shrubs top provide structure for your new walkway. And add some color with some easy to care for perennials. Perennials work well with a rock landscape because they are easy to care for yet they add beauty and color to the project.

Once the main plantings are in, you can start to add some smaller greens and flowers. You can add some greens in between the rocks in your walkway to fill in the gaps. Some people suggest that instead of using mulch to maintain the manicured look use river rock between the flowers. Both would work well it’s just a matter of taste and budget.

Now for the finishing touch –add some climbing vines that will wrap up and around your railing and front porch. Hanging plants can be hung from the roof of you porch or you can create a trellis for the vines and the planters. This will give it the finished look of a Tuscan garden. Decorative rocks are the final touch for this easy to do project and you’ll have a front yard that neighbors will envy for years.

For additional ideas for your landscape design, check out Landscape 4 Home.

Improve the value of your home with great landscape ideas

If you own a home, then sooner or later you are going to be ready to sell that home. Maybe you’ve already sold a home or two. People tend to move more often than our parents did.

There are a lot of things that go into getting the best possible price for your home, but the very first thing your home needs is curb appeal. When a prospective buyer, or a realtor for that matter, pulls up in front of your home, they immediately form an opinion about your house. Fair or not, that’s what people do. You can have the most beautiful home in the city, but if prospective buyers don’t get a super positive feeling about your house the minute they lay eyes on it, they are going to enter and view the rest of your house with a negative impression.

Fixing that problem is easy enough to do.

When people pull up in front of your house there are two things they see. A house, and the landscaping in front of that house. If the landscaping is unattractive, the house will appear to be unattractive. Landscaping for curb appeal does not cost a lot of money, it’s simply a matter of making sure the landscaping is neat, with well defined edges, and colorful. But when landscaping for curb appeal, the most important thing you need to do is to raise the beds with topsoil. Of course you have to do this before you plant.

Plants do much better in raised beds, and the plants in the beds really stand out. In order to raise the beds around your house you do not have to buy expensive stones and build retaining walls. Just establish the outline of the planting beds, cut an edge into the soil with a spade, and fill the planting beds with approximately ten inches of good rich topsoil. You’d be amazed at how much you can raise a planting bed without any type of retention.

Here are two more things you don’t need:

Plastic edging. It’s expensive, a lot of work to install, and it never stays in place. You can cut an edge with a spade and your landscape will actually look better. Then you can make the bed a little larger any time you need to.

The other thing you definitely do not need is weed control fabric. The stuff just doesn’t work. The weeds grow right on top of the fabric, then root through the fabric making it even harder to keep your beds weed free. You’ll find a really good article on weed control on my website.

When landscaping for curb appeal, plant placement and selection is very important. In a corner bed you need a centerpiece. I like Canadian Hemlock because they are evergreen and provide an excellent background for more colorful plants. In front of the Hemlock you can use a bright colored evergreen like Gold Thread Cypress, but don’t use too many. Usually three is all you want. Around the backside of the same bed you can use a darker evergreen like Taxus or even a flowering shrub that you keep trimmed down low like Weigela. Lots of colors are fine, but don’t stagger the colored plants in your landscape, use them in groupings, and be careful not to use too many in any one grouping. When you use more than three of any colored plant they lose their effectiveness. You are adding them for contrast, and when used sparingly they look much better.

Front Yard Landscaping Ideas For Your Home offers a lot of good landscape ideas.

In front of a house I like to use an arc of medium height plants like Blue Girl Holly, then put a couple of taller plants behind the arc. When landscaping for curb appeal you want the landscape to stair step toward the house. In other words, the lawn is the bottom step, the raised bed is step two, low growing plants step three and so on.

If you are re-landscaping an older home you probably should start with a sledge hammer before you do anything else and bust out the sidewalk to the front door. Some builders put in the ugliest sidewalks in the world, and they usually are hard to maneuver as you walk toward the front door. Once you have the old sidewalk removed, let your imagination run wild. Remember, you are landscaping for curb appeal, and there is no better way to establish ultimate curb appeal than with a beautiful curved walk that gently winds its way to the front door. Once again, there are photos of such sidewalks on my website, and you’ll see what wonderful landscaping opportunities they present.

The last step in landscaping for curb appeal is to create an interesting shaped raised bed in the front yard. Fill this bed with spring flowering bulbs, and annual flowers for the summer. If your house is going to be on the market in the fall, add some chrysanthemums for a burst of fall color.

So what’s the best benefit of landscaping for curb appeal? You’ll gain great experience so you can make sure your new home is landscaped just the way you want it!

Landscape Ideas to Enhance The Value of Your Home

For homeowners around the world, a big part of owning a home is landscaping the yard. Front yard landscaping or backyard landscaping, the work must be done. While the front yard is important because it’s more visible to neighbors and others who drive by, the backyard is no less important. The backyard is where families and friends gather for barbeques and birthday parties and where some families place their swimming pools. Most backyards are landscaped with careful thought and preparation. Special consideration is put into the positioning of every blade of grass, each decorative stone and all of the species of flowers that beautify a backyard.

Flowers, stones and grass are just some of the ways to landscape a backyard. Large shade trees, waterfalls and herbal gardens are some other ways. The theme of your landscape will depend on your hobbies, interests and goals for your backyard. Backyard landscaping can be a lot of fun, especially when you make it personal. Landscape your yard to reflect your personality and your homes personality. If you and your family like to entertain, add a bar to your back patio. Clean up the barbeque grill and don’t forget the citronella candles to keep the bugs away. Maybe you’ll want to build a croquet course, mini golf course, or put in a sand lot for some sand volleyball. Whatever your preference, make backyard landscaping fun for the whole family.

Keep your family in mind too, when it comes time to maintain the backyard landscaping. Large yards will require a lot more maintenance and grooming. Taking care of the yard can be a nice family activity. You can mow the lawn, pull the weeds and get the kids involved in watering the plants. If you have a fruit tree in your backyard, you’ll probably be spending some time picking up the fallen apples or cherries. And of course, you’ll also need to reserve time to tend to your herbal garden. It can be surprisingly rewarding to grow your own herbs and use them in special recipes that you cook when you’re entertaining friends and neighbors.

If you are the type who would rather keep your backyard to yourself, then maybe you don’t need to worry about the huge, green lawn. Perhaps you’d rather have a quaint yard with basic backyard landscaping. You can put in some grass, strategically place some shade trees and plant some of your favorite flowers. You may want to include some bigger bushes, if space allows as they will add some gorgeous green to your colorful backyard. This type of backyard may require the same maintenance as a large backyard, but not nearly the time commitment. No matter what your personality says about your backyard landscaping, one thing’s for sure—homeowners everywhere will tell you to create your backyard just the way you want to.

Check out Front Yard Landscaping For Your Home