[00:00] If you'd like your garden to look like this but your budget looks like this, then keep watching. You don't need a full, expensive garden makeover to make your outdoor spaces look amazing.
[00:14] You just need to know what's important to focus on. I'm going to share some of my favorite landscaping ideas that will completely change your outdoor spaces. This is Chip Valentino, Vice President in charge of DIY projects on a budget.
[00:34] Okay, Chip, hang out here. A really important way a DIY person can create a low cost and yet very useful landscape or garden is by keeping in mind the most important part of landscape design and that is creating spaces.
[00:52] It can be something as simple as a bench and a seating area or it can include a small water feature of some type or a fire pit. There can be an element of it that you have a little extra something that helps you make that space special
[01:09] or it can just be under a shade tree. Think about your landscape, your front and your backyard as a series of spaces or segments. These spaces can be very simple and inexpensive so you don't end up with a real complicated expensive final product.
[01:28] But you end up with something that you use every day and that's appealing and attractive, not just something to walk through to get to your front door. This idea of creating space is really what landscape architecture and landscape design is all about.
[01:44] And I'd like you to keep that in mind as you plan your garden and you plan it even in a way where you want to do it as inexpensively as possible. And speaking of defining space, nothing transforms a garden more than our next upgrade but you need to know how to use it well.
[02:02] Garden lighting can make your landscape look absolutely dramatic and what we like to do is focus on lighting up two areas. This one is wherever possible we want to light up trees with interesting branching and proper pruning.
[02:17] We like to have the whole thing be ambient lit by the lighting of the trees. The second to focus on is safety and utility which requires that you light up the path and the walkways and so you would use pass lights for those areas.
[02:35] Another one that is overlooked a lot that can be really effective is I like to use a wash light which is like a background light where you will wash it across an expanse either of shrubbery or fence with spalayas on it.
[02:50] When you use an up light on a tree, you're focused on that one tree but when you use wash lighting, you're focused on 10, 15, 20 feet of whatever's there planting, something interesting architecturally.
[03:04] Those are the three main types of lighting that we're thinking about and in order to do it yourself and do it at a cost savings, there's a few things you can do. One that we do a lot lighting can be expensive but the wire of the lighting which is a direct burial not required if you don't want to to put it in conduit or anything.
[03:24] You can run the wire anytime we like to run it when we're doing the irrigation. So you could put in the whole system without the lights for very little money and then a year or two later you put in the lights or maybe you come back and do one or two lights at a time as you can afford to buy them.
[03:40] Another way you're saving money by picking the right kinds of lights is use a light with an LED bulb. They use way less electricity and they make the process of putting in the system so much easier because you usually don't have to do a lot of calculations.
[03:57] Like we used to have to do 25 years ago with LED bulbs you can almost just run one wire. Lighting only does its job if the plants really look good. Here's where most people waste a lot of money without knowing it. Most people want it to look full grown and mature right from the start but that is very expensive and that also isn't in the best interest of the plants.
[04:22] The plants do best when you start them out in small sizes. This is really a big area of savings is the size of the plants. There's some plants that just don't make sense to plant anything other than a one gallon if you're planting a boxwood hedge.
[04:38] You know the whole boxwood hedge even when you get it up is going to be what? This tall? Why would you want to use a five gallon plant that gives you the edge of six inches or so? A five gallon boxwood is probably going to cost you $30 and a one gallon plant is going to cost you $10, $12 so if you have 50 of them you know that's a $1000 difference.
[05:01] In trees a lot of people want a big mature looking tree if you get up to standard size 15 gallon tree that's the size of the container. They're usually going to be seven feet tall and two or three feet wide on the top and that's going to cost $80, $85 usually.
[05:18] But there are a lot of trees that you can buy bigger than 15 gallon and that's when the price just sores. The least expensive tree if you can find it in a small size makes a lot of sense. Usually you can get to the next size in about one year in the ground.
[05:35] In keeping with this idea of patience the most cost effective way to use our products is with our soil optimizer or optimize and you can use it on your plants even this time of the year.
[05:48] Optimize is a patient approach to fertilizing your soil. Optimize is inexpensive because you need very little to treat large areas. In fact our three pound bag will treat 1000 square feet as opposed to trying to do it with compost or something that's in a bowl.
[06:06] Now let's talk about your lawn because this next one can not only save you a huge amount of money but it will look just as good. Another way to save money with your lawn is to seed the lawn rather than saw the lawn. Most people want to saw the lawn because it gives them this instant effect.
[06:23] But if you pick the right time you can recreate that look or catch up to that look in just four weeks if you do everything right. If we were to do 1000 square feet of sawd and you want to use our optimize as a soil conditioner and you're going to do all the work yourself you've got about $800 of cost.
[06:45] Obviously the day you lay that sawd it will look fantastic. If you seed you've only got about $100 of cost because you're doing all the labor yourself so we're not taking into account any labor here at all.
[06:58] So that's a dramatic savings of just the cost of doing sawd versus seed. This next one might be controversial. Many people think it saves time and makes your garden look better.
[07:11] It actually creates more work and may cause your plants to underperform. I don't really like landscape fabric around plants. I'd like you to consider using mulch instead of landscape fabric. If you continue to remulch you will go a long ways toward producing really active microbiologically healthy soil and that's the key to a healthy landscape and a healthy garden.
[07:36] Another thing you can consider once you're focused on using mulch is to use it in smaller sicknesses and it's amazing how much this can save you. Over 1000 square feet if you were to put two inches thick of mulch you would have to use about six cubic yards. If you have it delivered to your house is going to cost you about $600.
[07:59] If you take it down to one inch and you say I'm just going to make sure to replenish it once a year you're down to $300 for half the amount of mulch. One of the easiest ways to say time and money is to subscribe to our channel. Do you want that expensive landscape aesthetic?
[08:18] This next idea gives you a huge visual upgrade with the most cost effective and eco-friendly option. Circulation is one way to make your landscape look a lot more opulent easy to do and not expensive especially if you use some of these ideas that we use such as a gravel path with edging that is really good for the do it yourself or we use a little bit of decompose granite and then we use some kind of gravel on top and usually a vibratory compactor to press it into that DG.
[08:50] It's kind of a nice separation technique to define uses in your garden and doing it without spending a lot of money and doing it in a way that you can do yourself. Now this last one is one that many people spend thousands of dollars on replacing but you often don't need to with a simple mindset shift you can repurpose what you already have and save a ton of money.
[09:17] When I talk to homeowners, they're more willing than they should be to completely replace their fence. They recognize it's ugly and it's falling apart and they seem to think let's rip it out and start over and that is an option but on a lot of situations we've been able to save people a lot of money by just reinforcing the posts in the fence.
[09:38] Sometimes replacing a couple of pickets but the main idea is to make it strong and straight and we can do that without replacing the whole thing. If we just reinforce each 4x4 post with a new 4x4 pressure treated that comes up and finishes a little bit above grade it's amazing how with very little money we can completely renovate and existing fence.
[10:02] So if you have 100 feet at $30 a linear foot you're spending $3,000 to put in a new fence and take out the old one. If you just buy new posts, pressure treated posts and use this method that we're showing you here you can do it for $500.
[10:19] Alright bonus time. I'm going to name some of the quickest and most inexpensive upgrades to make your garden feel finished, polished and a perfect place to host your friends and family.
[10:32] So our first one is a little fire feature which you can put in intimate spaces around the garden or in this case you can put it so you can see it from inside the house. We originally got the idea because we had a candle out here and then we thought well a little fire feature would be even a little neater and this is inexpensive.
[10:52] It's like having a miniature fire pit. The sound of water in the landscape is amazing, a great addition and my next one ties into this it's small little water features.
[11:05] So there are a lot of neat little water features and they come in many different shapes and sizes and the neat thing about them is they look good but they sound good. Rather than building a big waterfall you can have a miniature little waterfall that reminds you of a big waterfall.
[11:22] Strategically placed vines are a great addition to the garden which can add color in the form of bloom interest in the pattern it makes on a wall and privacy.
[11:34] The vine can either screen noise or screen views that are undesirable and in that way vines can be another part of creating these separate spaces inexpensively.
[11:48] Color pots are another neat idea that we're stealing from Eddie the lazy landscaper. He is lazy but he can be clever too and that addition of colored pots of all different shapes and sizes and colors is a really neat way to add color to your garden.
[12:04] And then you can contrast that with some kind of color inside the pot and the combination can be striking good for small spaces and not terribly expensive. If you love these budget friendly upgrades you will want to watch my video on the top landscape mistakes to avoid.
[12:23] Avoiding these mistakes can help you save money, time and heartache.