Landscape Tips for Home Sellers

If prospective buyers looked at your house today, what would they see outside?   By spending $500 to $3,000 on plants and materials and a few hours of time, you can achieve a well-landscaped look without shelling out for professional help.  Besides the personal enjoyment you'll get from a prettier yard, landscaping adds more value than almost any other home renovation.

Edge the beds Cutting fresh edges where grass meets mulch makes the lawn look well kept.  Also, if your foundation plants are overgrown, widening the beds by two feet will make the shrubs seem smaller.

For truly lush turf, ideally you should start regular fertilizer treatments a year before listing the house. But you can green up the lawn with just a single application.  Expect each monthly application to cost about $20 (for straight fertilizer) to $30 (with weed killer).

For about $1 a plant, you can blanket your yard with petunias, impatiens and other small annuals that will flower throughout the current growing season.  Also invest a few hundred dollars in some larger perennials and in shrubs that stand at least four feet high.

A distinctive yard will make your home more appealing to buyers, so replace plants that don't flower, or provide interesting foliage with eye-catching alternatives, like a patch of blackeyed Susans, a flowering crabapple or a cutleaf Japanese maple.

If you're planning to stay put, you don't need to spend hundreds of dollars for big plants. You'll save 50 percent or more by buying small ones and waiting a few seasons to get the full visual impact (when planting, make sure to space them based on the mature size listed on the label, not how they look now).

Just a few hours and a little planning, and your home can be transformed into an eye-catcher, rather than an eye-sore.