Are you planning to take residential landscape pictures of your home to list it for sale or upload to your Facebook, Pinterest or Houzz page? Before you do, we have 5 tips on how to care for island flower and garden beds located on residential properties. Invest the time to make your landscaped property look beautiful before you schedule the photographer!

Tip 1. Perform Regular Landscape Maintenance Services
Regular landscape maintenance services, such as weeding, spraying, and raking, are essential to maintain a healthy garden year after year. Raking is completed on a regular basis to remove grass clippings or other natural debris within the garden bed or in surrounding areas. Raking also serves to aerate the top surface of the garden material, and to contribute to a well-groomed appearance in the garden bed. Hand weeding on a regular basis removes unwanted growth of grass, weeds or other plants.

Tip 2. Create Attractive Garden Beds and Borders
Landscaped gardens often include different types of garden beds, whether they are island beds or borders with a backdrop of a building, fence or hedgerow. A garden bed may include any combination of popular ground cover, flowers, plants, and trees. Island flower and garden beds are typically landscaped areas with a well-defined edge surrounded by grass or sidewalks. Perfect focal points for beautiful residential landscape pictures, garden beds and borders provide the character that defines your landscaping.

Tip 3. Redefine or Replace Bed Edges
The garden bed edge serves the function of retaining the bed materials in place, and separates the bed from walkways or grass areas. Periodically it is necessary to redefine bed edges due to natural overgrowth when a planted edge either grows beyond the scale that is appropriate as a bed edge planting, or simply deteriorates to the point that it no longer functions as a well-defined edge of the garden bed. When the bed edge is constructed of brick or other man-made material, it is occasionally necessary to replace portions of the edging material.  The distinct bed edge is made up of a variety of natural and artificial materials, such as:

• Planted or raised natural garden edge
• Path constructed of natural or man-made materials such as brick, flagstone or concrete
• Artificial bed edging material such as brick, plastic or metal edging
• Architectural/outdoor living structure  adjacent to the garden bed

Tip 4.  Perform Garden Bed Restoration on Older Gardens
Frequently, the residential garden is a second or third generation garden with beds as old as the building, that now stand in need of restoration including removal of old plants and addition of new.  As yard and garden maintenance specialists, Aardweg Landscaping offers a wide range of garden and flower bed restoration services, beginning with cultivation and proceeding to thinning, removal and/or replacement of plants. Cultivation involves tilling, preparing and improving the soil for the healthy growth of plants. The cultivation of bed areas may include overturning the soil by shoveling, hoeing, and raking to improve soil drainage, increase water and nutrient holding capacity, and aerate the top layer of soil. Adding the right plants, trees, and flowers to enhance the garden design, is the next step.

Tip 5. Selectively Add Flowers
When flower bed care is needed in the residential garden, it may require the addition of new flowers to an existing garden, or the creation of a whole new flower bed area. As yard and garden maintenance experts, Aardweg Landscaping select flowers with alternating bloom schedules to provide seasonal color. Spot spraying is sometimes needed in the garden beds as part of flower bed care for general disease prevention. It is administered selectively at regular intervals during the year.

Once your landscaped gardens are thriving and looking beautiful, schedule the photographer to come out to take residential landscape pictures of your property. If you own a suburban Philadelphia property and require garden and flower bed care performed by a professional, Aardweg Landscaping is a full service yard and garden maintenance company that provides landscaping design, installation and maintenance services at homes across the Philadelphia and Tri-State region.

A recipient of a Best of Houzz 2014 Award for Customer Satisfaction in Landscape Design and Architecture, Aardweg Landscaping has the experience, dependability and quality workmanship to perform your flower bed care work to your satisfaction — meeting and exceeding your every expectation. Contact Aardweg Landscaping today for more information by telephone at 610.355.0703.

Don’t miss the wide variety of Aardweg Landscaping residential landscape pictures on Houzz and YouTube.