While we all know that the quality and care of the inside of your home is hugely important, so too is the quality and care of your external properties. Caring diligently for your lawn is a must, as the proper landscaping can actually end up having a considerable impact on your life as a whole. Through proper landscaping, the overall value of your property might even end up increasing, something that will certainly be quite beneficial at the end of the day.

This will be particularly true if you’re looking to sell your home. After all, research into the subject has suggested that those who improve the overall appearance of their outdoor spaces prior to selling will actually be able to sell their home for as much as a full 14% more than what would have otherwise been possible. And the power of landscaping is truly so immense that up to 90% of all real estate agents working all throughout the United States will ultimately recommend the addition of better landscaping before your home is ever even listed on the market. You don’t even have to spend a lot – investing a mere 5% or so of your home’s overall value into your landscaping can give you a total return on investment that is quite truly immense – up to 150% when all is said and done.

But how, exactly, should you be improving your home in the first place? For one thing, you can plant new trees. The benefit of trees on just about any given property can be quite immense indeed, to put it lightly. After all, trees can bring added oxygen and a feeling of privacy from the outside world. They can block out light and much of the unwanted sounds taking place in your neighborhood. When these trees grow large enough, it is likely that they will even lower your cooling costs for their ability to block out sunlight.

But when planting trees, you want to ensure that each and every tree is planted in a way that will be conducive to its growth on the whole. For this reason, it is critical that you do not plant your trees too closely together. Ideally, you’ll want to make sure that each and every tree planted has the space for a circle of mulch that extends at least three total feet in diameter, if not even more than this. And the mulch that you pick will also matter, as there are actually more types of mulch out there than many people realize. Organic mulch is common, certainly, but many people also find that using inorganic mulch ultimately gives them a better result and allows their gardens to grow in a more plentiful way.

For all of your garden, from your trees to your smaller plants, you’ll want to take a number of different steps that ensure the overall health of your plants. You’ll be able to do this by using a small layer of pea gravel or crushed shell throughout the garden, used as landscaping rocks. While this might seem to be a bit counterintuitive, it is something that can most certainly have a big difference indeed. Even just a small layer of such rocks or crushed shell can actually prevent weeds from ever growing in the first place, making pea gravel and crushed shell a popular and wholly inexpensive method of weed control, to say the very least.

Gravel and crushed shell for driveways, of course, can also be used in the creation of a gravel driveway. Gravel driveways with crushed shell in bulk are quite commonplace indeed, ideal for their ability to stand up in the fact of time, as such driveways will be able to last at least a decade before being in need of repair. At the end of the day, having pea gravel and other types of gravel like crushed shell making up your gravel driveway is something that can benefit a great number of people – and is certainly something that can get your house ready for being placed up on the market.

The payoff of having good landscaping in general is likely to be a considerable one, there’s no doubting this.