Use Our 10 Easy Landscaping Ideas

Easy Landscaping Ideas to Refresh a Porch Garden

Several of our well-established shrubs were killed by a winter freeze

Like many homeowners, maintaining your front porch and front porch landscaping is an ongoing task. Our landscaping was battered during a bitter cold winter front, unfortunately killing several of our shrubs, including a 10-year-old holly.

Along with that, later this year we will replace our front porch brick steps with stamped concrete steps and landing.

With these two issues in mind, our weather-related battered shrubs and our porch steps project for later in the year, we wanted to revitalize our front porch landscaping in the meanwhile. We didn't want to invest greatly, especially where in the area of our porch steps, so we we decided to add some budget-friendly, colorful annuals and perennials to give it a lift.

Moving plants around is one way to refresh your landscape

One creative way you can refresh your landscaping is to move plants around. Meaning plants you already have.

To that end, we removed the three dead shrubs and replaced them with three barberries that were already in our landscaping. If you do this, be sure to read about when it's a good time to transplant for your particular species. There's always a risk of losing a plant due to the shock of being moved.

Our barberries were somewhat affected by the cold front, but they appear as if they will survive well. And surprisingly, when we moved them, we were delighted how much more interesting they look in their new locations. Their reddish color among our existing boxwoods adds contrast and additional color.

Even our ten-year-old holly didn't make it

Surely, we thought, a ten-year-old holly would survive the freeze we had. Unfortunately, it did not. Not a sign of life in it.

So with quite a bit of effort, we removed the holly at the corner of our porch. Sad though. One year we had cedar waxwings enjoy the berries from our holly.

Planting viburnum where our holly used to be

In the open space where the holly used to be, Dave planted purple viburnum (fifty cents each), pink and purple moss phlox, and two perennial pink hollyhocks. He also planted some vibrant yellow marigolds to help ward off our resident deer. Only time will tell.

Our spring landscaping refresh

Because we plan to replace our brick steps and landing later this year, we chose to plant annuals in the area where the new landing will be constructed and where the barberries were previously located. This provided a spacious area from which we hope to have a very colorful array of summer plants.

Marigolds and wax begonias will add some sparkle to our garden this year

We chose bright yellow marigolds and wax begonias which we found at Lowe's for fifty cents each (a flat of eight plants for $3.98) We call that a bargain in today's world.

We look forward to seeing our new annuals grow and bloom

And, speaking of deer, we live next to a woods and have plenty of deer friends visit periodically. We make our own deer spray using mixture of milk, water, eggs, garlic powder, and pepper. We find we need to be consistent about spraying, but we hope this helps greatly to keep our plants from being eaten.