Calculate Your Landscape

Here's the scenario: you have a certain amount of yard to fill, and you aren't sure how many plants you'll need to fill up that space. You also might need to know how much mulch is required for an area, or how much stone or gravel you need to fill up a space. If you've ever been in this position, or you feel you might be one day, you will absolutely adore the Landscape Calculator tool.

If you're looking to fill up an area with plants, you can click the "Plant Calculator" image and enter the inputs for your dimensions. You'll need the area in square feet, the plant spacing you want in inches, and the number of trees in the bed. If you enter a 10 square-foot area and say you want 10 inches of space between plants, the calculator will come back and tell you that you have room for 6 plants.

In addition to plants, you can also calculate things like how much mulch you'll need for an area, how much stone or gravel you'll need for an area, or how long it'll take for you to mow a specified amount of turf. For landscapers or homeowners who are landscaping on their own, this is an incredibly useful tool.

Prepping a Christmas Landscape

The Christmas holiday will soon be upon us, and that means you'll likely be decorating soon (if you haven't already). The typical outdoor Christmas landscape design usually consists of outdoor lighting hanging from the home and on bushes, as well as various yard ornaments. If you really want to go overboard, you'll synchronize your lighting with music, like so.

As far your plant-related landscape goes, evergreen shrubs are great choices for the lighting in front of your home. If you have these types of shrubs, you can add different lighting colors to each shrub, giving them the appearance of Christmas tree balls.

Good picks for Christmas shrubs include shrubs in the Dogwood family. If you have Dogwood shrubs like the Artic Fire or Redosier Dogwood, you have shrubs that look good on their own, and will hold up well when strung with Christmas lights.