DIY Life

This is Part I of a five part series detailing the rehabilitation of a "plain Jane" back yard into a really nice landscape. My son and his wife live in a cool little town adjacent to West Palm Beach, Florida. Their home is somewhat akin to a "shotgun" style, with a similarly shaped back yard.

Over the course of a week, I helped my son with the latter stages of the plan that he and his wife had begun to implement shortly after they moved into their home. The back yard is now a very welcoming part of their home, complete with paver patios and walkways, a water feature, new sod and plantings, and provisions for the future expansion of irrigation and landscape lighting.

For all things neat about your yard, don't miss Diane Rixon's Avant Yard, here on DIY Life. Additionally, if you want to consider something other than pavers, take a minute and look at my feature on some of the options.

Check out the gallery for the process involved in the initial stages of the construction and, after the jump, we'll get into the fun stuff.

At an upscale garden center the other day I saw the cutest UFO-style toad house for sale. For, like, $90. Ack!! Really nice if you have the money for something like that. However, you can actually encourage toads for just pennies down. Any small, toad-sized container offers toads the shelter they need to feel safe. Meanwhile, something more elaborate need only set you back a few bucks.

Need inspiration? Check out these photos of toad villages posted by readers of About.com. These are so cute, aren't they? Personally, though, I'm into a more naturalistic look, something I think might be more likely to attract wildlife, too. In the photo above you can see the toad house I made using polished stones. I'll talk more about that in a bit, but also be sure to check out my gallery for step-by-step photos!

Before going any further with the toad houses, however, let's backtrack a little. Why encourage toads in the first place? Well, first of all, toads are suffering as human habitats (cities and suburbs) suck up more and more land. Second, toads are also being harmed by exposure to chemicals used in landscape maintenance. By giving a toad or two a safe place to hang out, you're helping boost their numbers.

As promised, this is the third in a five-part series on retaining walls and their construction. We've already talked about natural stone and pressure-treated timber walls, so on to one of my favorites, engineered walls -- oh yeah! Engineered walls are cast concrete blocks that are gravity-stacked and assembled kind of like a puzzle. I like this kind of wall because it is the strongest wall of the types I've enumerated. It is not as architecturally flexible as a stone wall, for example, but it will solve a bunch of grade change problems that the others may not. It should be noted that the majority of engineered wall work is for commercial applications, but small walls certainly have their place in a residential site.

Take a look at the gallery, so you see what some of the options are, and we'll continue.

When it comes to protecting our families from poisonous plants, we go about things wrong, all wrong. Backwards, in fact.

Yes, you are probably already aware that a great many common garden and container plants are poisonous to humans and/or family pets. But if I asked you to identify the ones posing the greatest risk to you and your family, chances are you'd be stumped, or perhaps hard pressed to name more than one or two.

Why? Because we learn about poisonous plants from our teachers at school, from books, and from television. We see pages and pages of photographs of toxic leaves and berries. We scan ultra-long lists of poisonous plant names. The nerdier among us (Ooh! Me! Me!) have tried and failed to memorize some of this mass of information.

Silly thing is, your own yard is the best starting point for learning. Once you feel confident in your own landscape, it will be much easier to branch out and learn about less well-known species, which I'll discuss after the jump. And check out my gallery below if you'd like to see some of the common poisonous plants growing in my yard.

Inspire passion in your beloved gardener! Give him/her a living plant this Valentine's Day. When planted and tended with care, it's a gift that keeps on giving, beautifying the landscape for years to come. Here are two Valentine's Day-appropriate suggestions: the willow tree and the rose bush.

The Willow tree: an unexpected Valentine's Day surprise
For a dramatic gesture, how about a willow tree? Willows were traditionally associated with fertility and reproduction. The ancient Greeks, for example, believed willows increased a woman's chances of becoming pregnant and would lay branches from those trees in the beds of infertile women. (Sounds really uncomfortable!) Some Native American tribes also associated willow trees with fertility, laying willow branches in the beds of newly married couples. (Ditto!) Read more here about the willow tree's symbolic value.

Most people, with few exceptions, are soothed and calmed by the sounds of trickling or splashing water. Since the majority of us are unable to reside close to a shoreline or babbling brook, the building of ponds and fountains has become very popular.

Unfortunately, ideas and plans for building your own source of water pleasure seem to be in relatively short supply and kits to accomplish these projects can be terribly expensive. A fountain style known as a "water wall" has become an extremely desirable home environment detail both indoors and out, but most people just aren't sure where to begin. Water walls are actually quite simple and can definitely be a do it yourself project.

What I shall attempt to provide you with now, is enough quality information to get you beyond the point of just deciding that you can bring your desire for a water wall to reality. If I had the space and funds to actually build you a working model, I'd do that but current circumstances restrict me to only providing you with information at this time.

Weeds, every lawn has them. Our blogger, Dan Chilton examined some alternative strategies for killing weeds without resorting to the use of expensive lawn care chemicals. Based on Dan's inspiration, I thought I'd give you a look at one of my "stay green" strategies for dealing with the nastiest weeds that pop up repeatedly in the middle of your yard. The trick to permanently eliminating your toughest weeds is to make sure that any root which remains in the ground cannot regenerate.

You can wrestle beauty from the most unexpected things, in this case from a big nasty pile of rocks. The place where my wife and I live came with a landscaping detail known as a "stone fence." In technical terms this is defined as a big long pile of rocks intended for animals not to cross over. When we moved here I determined that something had to be done about that mess.

The pile was a long, tangled, dirt and grass filled hulking mass which had been pushed aside by a bulldozer to make way for the house. The first few pictures in the gallery show what kind of a mess it started out as. Please note that I am doing this entire job without benefit of any power equipment. At most, I have used a hand winch to help move a couple of the largest rocks.

I've been at this project for two summers now. I get to work on it about every third weekend. I expect that the project will be completed by the fall of this year.