A few years ago, my dad got tired of the mis-matched rocks and broken bricks that my mom used to line the flower beds around our house. So he and I went to a local home improvement store and bought about a dozen scalloped brick edgers for her to use instead. We brought them home, and then went off again on another errand.

When we returned, my mom had already put the brick edgers in place the way she wanted them. Because there weren’t enough of the edgers to stretch to all the flowerbeds, she’d interspersed the edgers with those same old broken bricks and rocks. So it rather spoiled the effect. My dad just threw up his hands and gave up. There’s no doubt about it, when it comes to designing landscaping my mother does not have any taste. But if you ask her about it she’ll say that she likes the way everything looks.

There’s not much point to that story, except to say that either you have good taste or you don’t, and if you don’t have good taste hopefully you’re self-aware enough to know it, and hire someone else to do your designing!

What makes good taste? Well, it’s not necessarily a liking for wood over metal, or metal over plastic. All that is a matter of personal taste and is not necessarily bad or good. But if you’re going to have a series of bookcases in your home, for example, they should be all the same design – all wood, all metal, all plastic – so that they match and don’t detract from the eye. That’s the key to good taste.

If you do have an eye for design, then you’ll probably find that your landscaping can be set off quite elegantly with the addition of brick patio stones, paving stones and landscape edgers. As with any other landscaping accessory, these bricks come in a vast variety of colors and designs, so that you’re sure to find something you like. Only please, buy enough so that you can use them on every project, and if you run out – go back to the store and get more! Don’t ruin the effect by adding broken brick and rocks…it just doesn’t work.

Use brick to line your flower beds, build up retaining walls, or make pathways.

Add a patio

If you’d like to add a brick patio to your backyard, it’s quite easy to do, but you do have to give it some thought. Take some time to ensure that the ground where you want to place the patio is level – otherwise some of the bricks might settle and others will rise and give the patio an unfinished look. Also if live in an area with frequent frost or snow, where the ground has a tendency to heave up, you’ll have to take that into consideration. Consult with your local home improvement store professional to learn the best ways of building your patio. As for the design of the bricks, you can get plain brick and place them in rows, or alternate them vertically and horizontally, or do a sort of basket weave. The design is pretty much up to you. However, check your local building or neighborhood codes to make sure they don’t have any say over whether or not you can add a simple patio.

As with any landscaping feature, design what you want on paper first, before you go out and purchase the material. Then, go out and buy your material, pick up a couple of pairs of sturdy gloves to protect your hands, and get to work!

For the last few years my husband and I have enjoyed spending our free time in our backyard, we have a deck, a patio, and an in-ground pool, it’s wonderful! Yet the rest of our yard just seemed to be kind of dull. We planted flowers and flowering bushes, which brought our yard some color, but they only gave the yard that pizazz we were looking for for a short period time, we were missing something.

There are quite a few ways to begin decorating in your backyard, a great way to begin adding some depth to it is to draw live birds into your yard. My husband and I have enjoyed watching the various birds that are indigenous to our local, so one day we jumped onto the internet to see what we could do to draw them into our backyard on a daily basis. We learned that providing a place for the birds to rest, bath and feed were great ways to draw them into our yard.

Feeders were our main focus on how to initially draw the birds into the yard, after all, a birds gotta eat right? We learned that different birds have different eating habits as well. Robins prefer open areas to feed, where as smaller birds like the sparrow enjoy feedings they can perch on, and hummingbirds can be drawn in with a simple sugar and water mixture you can make at home (1 part sugar to 4 parts water, no sweeter than that). The great thing about a hanging bird feeder is that a mixture of seeds will set a table for a good variety of birds.

Bird baths are another great way to bring birds into your backyard. Birds enjoy fresh water and keeping themselves clean and a bird bath will draw a good number of birds in as well, be sure to keep the bath clean and the water fresh.

After you’ve set these items up in your yard, you can move on to placing several bird houses in your yard. Now depending on which birds that are indigenous to your area you’ll need to research their nesting habits, for instance, robins are platform nesters which is why they build nests in tree branches and bushes, but a smaller bird like a chickadee or a sparrow look for small holes or cavities in trees to nest in, so a bird house with a narrow opening would be ideal for them.

Finally, place your feeders in a spot that other animals, like squirrels and raccoons, can’t get to. Place the feeders on tall shepherd’s hooks or posts with baffles on them so the animals can’t climb up to the feeders.

Enjoy your new living decor!

Joseph Deal has enjoyed spending time with his wife Denise watching and attracting birds to their backyard for years. For great ideas to draw birds into your backyard visit http://www.birdhousehome.com