How to Cognize if Your Yard is the Tacky One on Your Street

Here’s how to tell if your yard is part of the tacky holidaymaker tour in your city:

• You have a ½ barrel spilling purple petunias (and the odd weed), enclosed by a medium-sized rock and a round dug-out area.

• You have white, quartz pebbles in any part of your garden and especially beside the private road in linear rows of what resembles poodle-droppings.

• You leave-up and plug-in your multicolored Christmas lights all year round.

• You have a ceramic goose and you dress it up for all holidays including your dog’s birthday.

• You buy inflatables, of any variety…even at Christmas, they are not cool and if you have more than one be prepared for time of day pin-attacks…to watch it die slowly.

• Too many a colors in your planting arrangement. Red and yellow and pink and green, purple and orange and blue…I can see a rainbow, see a rainbow, see a rainbow too. Enough said.

• Even as worse then that??? Fake flowers. So, you have a black thumb or you’re simply lazy…let it go. Put several grass seed down instead. Fake flowers can melt in the sun, be covered with cat body waste and they fade PDQ.

• If you buy the following plants you are borderline (mind the pun) tacky: marigolds, petunias and begonias. These plants are wayyyy out of fashion (unless you grow marigolds in your herb gardens to put on salads). C’mon, really, get with the times and accept change. Go wild, throw in the odd Japanese Anemone or ornamental grass or actually go crazy and throw in a large liliid monocot genus that is bigger than your kid’s head.

• Garden sculptures and garden ornaments are all simply about the usage. So, you like garden gnomes. Garden gnomes are great, but moderation is the key. Or, if you’re to a fault excited simply about the seven-million dwarfs, at bare minimum, support them against the perimeter fence and out of the direct view of your neighbors windows. If you have them on your front lawn, whistling patch they work, and NONE go missing by the end of the season, you cognize a) that no one wants the monstrosities and b) there are no such things as dwarfs or gnomes that move to life at night (or fairies for that matter).

• Plastic…anything plastic (not organic compound that looks like concrete) is a brobdingnagian no, no! Think, would-be you put that in your home (well, you probably would-be if you have any of these yard and garden features listed)? If you wouldn’t, than think simply about this…your neighbors get a 1st impression of the interior of your home, by looking at the exterior. Also, your garden should be an extension of your home, like a room of its own.

• Home Butterflies. Ok, they were cute in the late 70’s. You cognize what? No, they weren’t even as cute then. I bet several folk have not bought a home that was up for sale because of the orange, metal monarch butterflies fast to the side of the home instead of blissfully on their way to the mountains of Mexico.

• A car on blocks looks, well, quite candidly abysmal.

• Grass. Cut the stuff. If its soooo long you get bathing costume rash and wild animals move for dinner then you cognize it’s too long.

• Flags. One or two nonfunctional flags are nice, provided you don’t have any of the different stuff listed here, but more than that and oh my.

If you are reading this, chances are you have several style and pizzazz which follows through to a stylish garden. Therefore, there is that person on your street that has many a of these items. My proposal to you: walk by and note the number of the house, print off this article and mail it anonymously. Feel free to add your own notation simply about that one thing that drives you crazy…sit back and watch the bonfire.

Kate Oscar palmer robertson prides herself on seeing the humor in life. She is an avid agriculture enthusiast and is a freelance causative editor to http://www.yardandgardendecor.com – a site that offers information on garden arbors, wind chimes, weather vanes and more.