Cutting Costs, Not Corners, With Your Landscaping Project

Whether you’re hoping to up the curb appeal of your property, to better enjoy your outdoors in the summer, or you simply like switching up your garden for fun, landscaping can make a big impact on the look and feel of your home. However, landscaping projects can also be pretty expensive, sometimes prohibitively so. As such, we’re going to look at some of the ways that you can manage those landscaping costs without sacrificing the quality of the project.

Link - CC0 License

Choose your plants with care

If a lot of your landscaping is coming down to selecting and planting new plants in your garden, then you might want to take some time to pause and consider your priorities. Opting for aesthetics alone is likely to lead you down some expensive paths. First of all, you should consider using native plants, which are not only cheaper because they don’t have to travel as far to land in your garden, but they’re well-adapted to your local climate and soil conditions, reducing the need for excessive watering, fertilizers, and maintenance. Furthermore, choosing perennial plants that come back year after year can greatly reduce your need for annual replanting. This may limit your choices to some degree, but you might be surprised by the variety of local plants you haven’t considered.

Get your own materials

If you’re relying on a landscaping company to do much of the digging, building, and other groundwork that will lay the foundation for a gorgeous garden, it can be tempting to leave everything up to them. However, if you let them source your materials, you might not actually be getting the best deal. Take your time to scout the landscaping supply market to find those near you who can sell materials such as gravel, rocks, decorative rocks, boulders, retaining walls, and more, to see if you can’t get your supplies more cheaply, yourself. Where possible you should also buy materials like soil, mulch, and plants in bulk to take advantage of discounts and reduce per-unit costs. Even if you don’t use all of them immediately, you could end up keeping the leftovers for future landscaping projects.

Do it yourself

Of course, one of the cheapest ways to complete any landscaping project is to do it yourself, or at least do as much of it yourself as you can. Don’t push yourself to do things that you’re not confident you can do well or safely, but simple tasks like planting, mulching, and minor installations can be done yourself to save on labor costs. You should also consider breaking the project into phases so that you’re better able to spread out the costs over time, allowing you to make sure that you have time to build the budget you need to hire contractors while taking care of the little jobs.

It is possible to make your landscaping project significantly less expensive. Just make sure that you do it in a way that doesn’t compromise your vision, or you might find yourself starting the project back up again in the near future.