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A little rose named Sunsprite

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Sunsprite Rose

Sunsprite. What an aptly named rose.

This gem of a rose is located in the back flower bed of my garden.

Considering that this rose is not all that tall – perhaps 3 feet at it’s tallest – I really should have planted it in a more prominent position so that I could enjoy it’s lovely flowers more often.

When this rose blooms I can see it’s flowers from my kitchen window so there’s no worry that it’s lost among other plants in my garden.

Like many of my other roses the blooms of summer are a slightly different color than it’s spring blooms. This rose has a medium yellow bloom in the spring but as you can see in the heat of summer it’s much paler with white edges on the outer petals.

Do you grow Sunsprite?






Landscaping adds value to your home and gives you extra living space

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I’ve noticed lately that the value of homes in our area has been going up and up. We’ve only lived in our house for six years and already and going by the price similar homes in our area have sold for, our house has gone up in price by more than $250,000 making homes in our area $450K +.

Don’t be fooled. There’s nothing particularly special about the homes in our area. It’s a nice neighborhood, but it’s not a gated community or anything. Housing prices have just been going up.

The odd thing is, I find many of the homes rather plain Jane. For all I know they’ve been gutted and completely renovated inside, but from the outside they don’t look like anything special.

That’s where we are different. We are renovating the inside of our home, but we began our indoor renovations at the same time as our outdoor landscaping. Luckily we finished the outdoor landscaping the same year we started. The indoor renovations are ongoing much to my dismay.

We have no plans to sell our home, but I’ve always figured that all the work we’ve done landscaping our yard and caring for our lovely garden has added value to our home.

My suspicions were confirmed when I read an article on Plant-Care.com that states that a study cited in Smart Money magazine states that consumers value a landscaped home up to 11.3% higher than it’s base price. I’m pleased with that report since our home is the only one on the whole block that really has any landscaping. We’ve added value to our home. It’s confirmed!

The article that I found that information in was one that discussed a number of unique backyard landscape ideas. If you’ve considered landscaping your front and or backyard and would like some great ideas you should go read the article. There are links within the article that lead to other articles with more in depth information about each particular type of landscaping discussed within the main article.

We don’t have a pool and we never will because our backyard is just too small to have a pool, but if you’ve thought of putting a pool in your yard or perhaps have one, but haven’t done much else to the yard you should read the section on pool and landscaping around the pool area. Certainly if you’ve watched any of the programs on TLC you know that you can landscape a pool area in many different styles and your yard could go from a recreation area to a true living area with a little landscaping.

As many of you know our landscaped backyard includes raised garden beds along the perimeter of the yard and a lovely patio for entertaining. There are some great deck and patio landscaping ideas discussed in the above mentioned article. If you’ve thought of putting in a patio or deck, but you aren’t sure where to start or what materials to use you’ll get some great starter suggestions by reading the articles linked to the landscaping write up.

Some simple, and economical ways to landscape your yard, whether you already have a fully landscaped backyard or just a flowerbed or two is to add some garden lighting. Outdoor lighting, electric or solar, can be used to light a garden path or highlight plants or other features with a garden or backyard. We use solar outdoor lighting and it makes our yard look quite lovely at night. It also makes it pleasant to sit outdoors in the evening in the dimly lit garden.

We used interlocking easy stone to create our raised garden beds, but we could have used layered rocks, or we could have brought in some larger rocks and made landscape features out of them. The above mentioned article discusses the use of rocks in the landscape and how to create a natural look using rocks.

One thing that my husband in particular wants to add to our garden is landscape speakers. There are some speakers that are made to look like rocks that you can place within your garden and hook up to your indoor stereo system which would allow you to have music in your yard yet maintain a natural look and feel. I’m pretty sure that, that is one of the ideas that we’ll use ourselves that’s mentioned in the landscaping article.

I’ve actually visited the Plant-care.com website several times in the past when I’ve been looking up plant care information. I know I visited this site when I was looking up information on Aglaonemas – Chinese evergreens a couple of years ago. They had several articles about these easy to care for plants so they kept coming up in my Google searches. I actually think that’s how I discovered the site in the first place.

To close this long post I’d just like to get back to my original idea. if you’ve been reading my blog for any length of time you know I get quite a bit of pleasure out of my landscaped backyard. I love it and visitors adore it. If you haven’t yet landscaped I would strongly encourage you to do so. You’ll get extra living space that I’m certain you’ll enjoy and it appears you’ll also increase the value of your home.

Take a look at the landscaping article. I’m sure you’ll get some great ideas for your own backyard landscaping.

Living green can save you money

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As a follow up to the post I wrote about whether the Live Earth concert would make a difference in the way people live I thought I’d write about one of the comments on the Go Smell the Flowers site that inspired my post in the first place.

One of the posters seemed to believe that changing over to a green life style would cost a lot of money and might discourage people from making such changes.

Well as someone who has changed her own life style over the years to live in a greener manner I can tell you that a green lifestyle can actually save you money.

Sure the energy efficient light bulbs cost more, but they last four or more times longer than regular light bulbs and barely make a blip on your energy bill so you’ll end up saving money by using them. Plus, if you’re a little bit afraid of heights like I am you won’t have to stand on chairs, step stools or ladders as often to change bulbs.

We compost our food scraps and then use the compost. We also add grass clippings, a small amount of paper product and leaves collected in the autumn to keep our compost going then we use the compost on our garden each spring. The compost is rich in nutrients and acts as a natural fertilizer for our garden.

Growing your own food is cheaper and less fattening than buying processed food or even veggies and fruit that have been transported from the other side of the country. The fruit and veggies that you’ll grow will be full of nutrients and fresher than those you can purchase in a store, plus the act of gardening is good exercise.

If you have a small space you can grow veggies in window box planters – whether they are mounted in a window area or not. If you compost you can use the compost that you’ve made on your own to fertilize your home grown veggies. Once you purchase your initial materials the cost of growing your own food is very low.

Hanging your clothes outside on a line to dry in the sun is cheaper than running the dryer and your clothes smell fresher. Our dryer is very old and uses a lot of energy – we save a ton of money by not using it very often.

Walking, or biking more often is good for you and doesn’t cost you a cent.

Taking public transport is cheaper than paying for gas and insurance for your car and has a lower C02 footprint.

Buying a re-usable bag to bring to the grocery store has an initial cost, but if you shop at a store that charges 5 cents per plastic bag you’ll save money in the long run and keep plastic bags out of landfills.

The law says we must recycle here in Toronto – at least if you are a home owner. The city provides the various recycling containers that we use so it doesn’t cost us any money to perform this task.

If you convert your house to an alternative power source it will be expensive, but in the research I’ve done on this I’ve learned that many homes in my city that have converted actually make surplus energy and the local energy company ends up buying it back from them. So in the long run that saves money or possibly even makes you money.

All of what I’ve mentioned above can save you money and I don’t find them difficult to do at all.

Do you have any more tips or ideas?

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