Here we are, halfway through the first month of the new year! Have you given up your resolutions yet? We hope not, especially if they involve landscaping your St. Pete Beach yard.

With so much focus on newness right now, it’s a great time to discuss adding something new to your landscaping with a garden bed installation! So much of landscaping is maintenance, but like with our own lives, beginnings matter, so here’s to getting your new garden started on the right foot!

What Can You Do?

Before you get started on installing the new plants in your garden or even designing your new garden bed, the first thing you’ll need is to know what you can do. The two things that factor into that are you and your landscape.

Landscape

Working with pros like Mulhern, there’s a lot you can do with your landscape that you may not be able to do on your own. But that doesn’t mean we can work miracles! You still need to work within what your plants can and can’t survive: i.e., Washing Cherries won’t do well in Florida.

While the above may seem obvious, what may be less so are the particular limitations of your specific microclimate. It’s essential to understand how shade, elevation, and the plants that are already in your yard will affect a new garden.

You

Another relevant piece of the “what can you do?” puzzle is you. How much maintenance do you want to put into your garden? How often will you adjust its design?

The effort may be less relevant with help from pros like Mulhern, but aspects like changes aren’t. For example, do you want annuals you can change out every season or perennials consistently around? Further, do you want something you can eat or something that serves only as decoration?

How often you want to make changes, and the required maintenance level are essential elements of garden design that should be thought through before you get too excited about any particular idea.

What Do You Want?

Now comes the fun part! You get to decide how you want your garden to look. Here are some of the most vital elements of garden design.

Colors

Got a favorite color? What colors will go well with it? Choosing a color scheme is part of your garden installation design, especially if you care more about the style than the function of your new garden.

Textures

How do you want your garden to feel? We can mean this both from a physical and emotional perspective. Different heights and textures can be a fun way to add variety to your garden.

For example, if it’s your style, some gentle-looking round-petaled flowers can look fun next to some spiky grasses. On the other hand, you may like more similar-looking plants that we instead differentiate by colors and heights.

Species

If you have a favorite flower or other plant, now is the time to consider that too. We can arrange the rest of your garden bed installation around your favorite plant, making it the star of the show.

What Will You Need for Your Garden Bed Installation?

Now that you’ve designed your garden and know what you want it to include, it’s time to get down to the installation. So what will you need to make your garden bed installation work?

Firstly, you’ll need your materials—the plants, of course, but also soil, mulch, and maybe fertilizer.

We’ll test your soil to ensure it has the right makeup for growing your desired plants. If not, we’ll amend the soil.

Now we’ll prepare your garden bed. Depending on what you have in place and your garden plot, we may need to level it or remove some plants like sod. Once it has the proper level and soil ph, we’re in business.

Next, we may need to soak your soil depending on how much water your plants need. Finally, we’ll plant all your plants, water them and cover them with mulch. The mulch will help create a weed barrier and retain moisture for your new garden bed installation.

Because you live in your home, we’ll give you instructions on what to do and what to look out for to help your new garden thrive in these early days.

Conclusion

Adding a new garden bed takes a lot of careful planning and work, but with the help of Mulhern, it will be easy for you to end up with a quality garden bed installation. At Mulhern, quality is job number one.