I having been living in Florida for just over 10 years now and after spending the early years in the home making our property look nicer from the inside, I knew that sooner or later we’d have to invest in the garden. I always felt a lot of envy towards my neighbors because of how beautiful their gardens were and that brought a certain social pressure to get ours done too. My neighbor Ron Cadman is a gardener by trade and thanks to him I was able to save a lot of money on the garden. I had already been to a lender in Orlando to get some funds for the garden but after speaking to Ron I decided that we wouldn’t have to make such a large investment to get ourselves a nice garden, and here is why you don’t either.

DIY

Much of the garden renovation could be done by my own hands and whilst I would be a fraud if I said I was a gardener, a large amount of the work needed nothing more than hard work rather than technical ability. And so last Labor Day weekend I decided to dedicate myself to cleaning up the garden, throwing away the waste and the weeds, chopping down the unsightly tree stumps and generally cleaning the place up.

Advice

Ron was on hand to help me with the technical stuff but even if you don’t have friend who can help you out you’ll find a plethora of information online which can help. For example when it came to planting lawn seed I didn’t know the best way to do it, I did consider paying for a company to come and lay down strips of lawn, but I wanted to do this bit on my own. Armed with advice I purchased lawn seeds, far cheaper than buying turf, and I started the process of getting a lush lawn out back.

Little by Little

If you want a garden which will be ready in just a couple of weeks then by all means invest the cash and pay professionals to do this for you. For me however I realized that we were in no mad rush to get the garden completed and so we did things in small stages. Labor Day weekend saw me clean up and prepare the ground for the lawn, and then each night or whenever I had some time I would tend and treat it. The same thing goes for plants and flowers, you can gradually plant them and then wait for results.

Details

If you want additional details in your garden such as a pool, a water feature, ornaments, fences or paths then this will of course cost money but again, these don’t need to be put in place all at once. In fact over the course of last year we gradually invested whenever we had a bit of money, and now the garden looks in great shape.

Investing some money isn’t a bad idea as property hunters in the USA want homes which have a nice garden already, the small investment which you do make will come back when the property is  valued.