DIY landscaping help Ask a question! ELY 080

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What’s up. I’m ben hill and this is the easy leaving yards. Podcast creating beautiful yard should be easy. Let’s jumping and create the dream yard. You deserve so you can enjoy more time doing what you love and welcome to episode eighty of the easy living yards podcast today. We have a a little bit of a different show today. I want to highlight some of the things we’ve worked on over it easy living yards dot com recently and i want to showcase what you can do to get help with me over at easy. Living yards dot com our guys. You’ve heard me talk in previous episodes about the you. Ask me a question function and that’s what today’s show is about now of course if you went deeper help. If you really ready to make a transformation your landscape this is a wonderful time to be thinking about that. go over and check out the easy living yards membership. You can always go to easy living yards dot com slash membership and there you’ll find information. You need to know to become a member today. When you become a member i have coursework to help you step step by step through the whole process. You know this whole landscaping thing can be overwhelming right. I get it so that’s why i created the easy. Living yards membership is to help hope you step by step from the idea phase to figure out what to do when to do it how to do it and then to actually do it. That’s what the easy living yards membership is here for. Its here to help you through the whole process and of course i’m here to in the easy living yards membership to to help you through step by step along the way all right so check out the easy living yards membership easy living yards dot com slash cash membership now. Today’s show were also talking about the ask a question function. You can always go to easy living in yards dot com slash pod. That’s easy living yards. Dot com slash p. o. d. in that is my podcast page has all these these episodes that we talk about on the podcast on that podcast feed likewise at the very top of that page. There’s a button that says ask me a question. That’s a perfect opportunity for you to take advantage of. If you have a burning question about your landscape whether it’s you don’t know where to start. You don’t know what plans to choose. You don’t what to do or how to do something. It’s a wonderful way to get in touch with me and have me help you out on your landscape. This is an absolutely free opportunity for you to get in touch and get to get some so called expert help. I don’t like calling myself an expert but i guess that’s what we all right all right so if you want help for me go go to easy living yards dot com slash pod and at the top of the page there you’ll see a button to ask me a question so what i wanna do today is to highlight a few of our listeners that that have reached out to me through this ask a question function and gotten some help in their landscapes and how it’s helped change their landscape so i i wanna talk about michelle. Michelle is actually a member of the easy living yards. Membership and michelle has a beautiful aspiration for a colonial coastal landscape. She lives on the atlantic coast in new england and she’s trying to transform form her new house for her family to be something beautiful that they can be proud of now. They live about a mile from the coast and they wanna have this beautiful expression russian of their coastal lifestyle as well as their colonial roots in the area further location. I hope i’ve summarized that twelve michelle if you’re listening so michelle’s asking how she can transform landscape express this colonial feel mm-hmm in a way that’s beautiful and easy to maintain so we’ve worked together because she’s part of the membership. I’ve been able to help her super closely to think about some plants they’re they’re gonna use and how to utilize their calves small front yard to really be expressive and beautiful and also to have a little bit of depth to do it to not feel so tight and small and instead to feel like this beautiful land scheme and of course with this kind of cape cod style design that she would like that matches her house she has a particular leaf pit particular affinity for hydros so we figured out how how to integrate hydrogen into a beautiful design that accents her house without obscuring her one story house at the same time so this is something and you guys out there need to think about is if you’re planning a front yard design you want something that accents your house you something that showcases your house without you know okay obscuring your house or or covering it up and so that’s one of the challenges here is is how to create depth to have some vertical height to the landscape without without you know just covering of your house and so michelle.

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I’m really thankful that you’re part of the membership your inspiration and your uh your dedication to making a positive change in your landscape is really inspiring and your energy is also a lot of fun to work with so thank you michelle if you’re listening out there. Let’s move on to jane. Jane has a awesome question that she reached out to me with just recently so jane is this has just moved into a new central valley home in california and jane had a really unique surprise for me. That was a lot of fun to work with actually and really made me think differently about the landscape than i’m used to so jane wanted to create a beautiful landscape to entertained chain guests in a way that i had never thought about and that is that jane is deaf in a lot of her friends are likewise deaf and so they wanted to have a place where they could connect and collaborate and entertain each other have fun together other in a way that was friendly to being deaf and so that really made me think about well what makes a landscape deaf friendly and this was such a fun thing to to kind of work together on is is we talked about okay. We want a gathering space that has clear lines of sight for for sign communication and for lip reading and also a landscape that has a lot of movement since is there’s not as much sound we want movement right and so how do we integrate movement to create a beautiful space. That’s entertaining. That’s fun and that’s zinc gauging when you don’t have the sense of sound and so you know this really ties into with landscapes. There’s so many elements to lance gifts chiefs. They’re living piece right and so they have they have smell. They have sound they have site touch so these are all things that you know is it can be integrated into your landscape and depending on what you want. They can really add a sense of beauty and connectedness to your space and so without the sound piece there you know that might see like a loss to part of the experience of the landscape but really hey. This is an opportunity to focus on texture and visual movement and engaging yourself in your guests us to want to touch things so having a lot of very texture in elements in there that make you want to reach out to touch them into experience them in a different way also to integrate things that smell wonderful into your landscape to have things that are in bloom all throughout the season for example so these were things we thought about about when jane approached me and asked me about how to think about creating her wonderful entertaining space for herself in her friends likewise. She wanted something that was low maintenance that was water tolerant being from central valley. She was very interested. In creating something that was mostly native that was well adapted to the space and was conscious of the stress water conditions nations of the area and so for that i really admired what jane was trying to do with her landscape and i look forward to having james share some of those results as as we can work through that process so next we had bennett bennett is moving into a new space with just a newly purchased which is home. He and his wife got this new home and they had this really funky backyard all right so so it was a short backyard and it kind of had an angle toward toward the back of it so one of the size of the property was much deeper than the other side so it was kind of a slanted back property line because of this he he was concerned about. How do you create a feeling of balance you did. He didn’t want it to feel like it was just this weird oblong space and so we kinda worked through a few ideas there to how to balance out that space or how to make space feel welcoming attractive and what does balance really mean and so that’s where we kind of dove into balance doesn’t necessarily mean symmetry what it does is. It’s a balance is a feeling of uh evenness i guess or it’s hard for me to articulate actually so let’s let’s work on this so balance.

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If you think about balancing a landscape it’s it’s about taking themes and making it feel even and a cohesive across the landscape. That’s the word did i liked uses cohesive and so for example you don’t want a ton of you know really dark plants on one side of your landscape and then really loosely formed the plants that are you know deciduous half the year and the other side is evergreens so you wanna evenly spaced across the landscape but it doesn’t have to be symmetrical so you can have a taller vertical shrubs evergreens on one side and then a couple mounted a low growing evergreens greens on the other side. That’s still from for me. Color in texture standpoint is balanced and so it doesn’t always have to be you you know exacting on both sides and what we did is we talked about a few elements that could maybe help feel more balanced or more deliberate so one was on that deeper side so you could have kind of like an entertaining space toward the back or even an open lawn area then with some backdrop of of obscuring shrubs jobs on the one side that kind of match was closer up on the other side the shallower side of the landscape likewise we also talked about maybe borrowing some scenery so so basically making the the yard field that extends beyond the property line so so that property line isn’t really clear in an open and and well defined and so it feel it doesn’t feel unbalanced because you can’t really tell where the property ends in the next property begins so it’s just a few examples samples some of the things we talked about with bennett’s landscape so bennett. If you’re listening i’d love to hear back from you on on kind of what you think about some of those thoughts and in what you plan plan to do next. Maybe with your landscape net gets me into the the next piece is i had a wonderful chance to talk with christine. Steve christie is looking to create legacy and i hope you’re okay with me. Sharing this on the show christie so christie reach out to me and shared with me some some very touching details that she has late stage cancer and so she’s actually in hospice and in christy. I hope you’re doing well right now. I hope things are going well. She wants to create a landscape both inside and out uh well wonderful home both inside and out including the landscape to leave behind a legacy toward her family family so christie’s thinking about leaving value beyond just an inheritance leaving this wonderful wonderful space for the people that she loves and this is so touching and so christi. If you’re listening here of first of all my thoughts are with you and i hope you’re well and second of all. Please reach out and let me know how things are going so i’d love to hear so christie wanted to know with her pool how to really really integrate the pool into the landscape to make it to feel together and also with a gate you know gates are kind of unsightly right and so how do you what are some things you can do with a gate to really make it feel beautiful in part of the landscape and also help create privacy at the same time two so we had a few thoughts there about krissy was asking about what about some of these like artificial foliage that you can put on the gate in and i had to do some research actually and it looks like now there’s some options out there that are really beautiful and attractive actually of some of this so you know so called artificial foliage college that you can put on your fence or on your gate to make it look like kind of like a living wall but of course you don’t have to sit there and maintain it all the time and it actually looks pretty nice and so i’d love to hear christie if that’s what you decided on or if or if you’re looking at putting some shrubs in specific strategic locations that can help provide some of that privacy are. I guess i just wanted to share with you. A few examples of how landscapes can for one provide provide value to us but also how they fit into the big picture and that is what i’ve talked about on other shows is that really our life is more important than our yard heart rate so our life should add to our yard should add to our life. It should not detract from it. It should be where we experienced life where we enjoy life but again something we can be proud of but we don’t have to feel obligated to maintain it all the time and that’s where we kind of get caught up in. Today’s world is just feeling stuck. Look like we have to maintain stuff all the time and always be taking care of it and that sort of thing and spending a bunch of time working on it.

00:15:08 – 00:17:10

That’s not value. That’s is not meaningful and that’s not leaving a positive legacy. That’s not experienced a wonderful time with our family and so really. I wanna help you to to create a beautiful yard that you don’t have to be working on all the time to maintain and that’s really what we’re all about here at easy living so if you have a question please reach out. Ask a question all right now. This free question process. I i have to give are you. A heads up is that i can’t always get back to you within twenty four hours. You know this is easy. Living yards my side hustle guys so in case you didn’t know that so so i have a fulltime job i try and focus on prioritizing my family i lake. I suggest you do as well and so if if you have a question i might not be able to get back to you right away but if it’s something urgent just let me know and i’ll do my best to get back to you when i can to to really help you out when you need it so guys with that. Go over to easy living yards dot com slash pod right at the top of the page. There’s a button to ask a question. All you do is you type your question and let me know some details like where what part of the world you live in because that’s helpful with understanding plants and stuff like that climate and then your question in just the few short couple sentences. That’s it guys in for for. All of you folks. I talked about today so bennett christie michelle mm-hmm jane think ago you guys they’re all right. Thanks so much for your questions. I hope my answers have helped you and i look forward award to hearing back from you to see kind of what you’ve been able to do with your landscape and the positive changes you’ve been able to make guys as always thanks for tuning in and make sure you live with passion and make tomorrow better than today yeah.