The first impression your lawn and landscape make when someone pulls up out front has a significant impact on your home’s value. Enhancing your property’s “curb appeal” can boost its price by up to 17 percent — and lawn and landscaping upgrades matter just as much as improvements to your house itself.1 Whether it’s pride in ownership or you’re testing marketplace waters, upgrading your lawn and landscape along these four avenues can help you kick your home’s curb appeal up a notch:

• Improving lawn quality
• Enhancing foundation plantings
• Adding landscape focal points
• Expanding landscape color

IMPROVING LAWN QUALITY

A healthy, luxuriant lawn ties the rest of your landscape together. It also gives onlookers an impression of how the rest of your property may be maintained. Quality grasses, suited to your location, and regular lawn maintenance help keep your home’s curb appeal at peak. A simple weekly maintenance schedule that includes maintaining the best mowing height for your grass type keeps your property looking fresh, and helps grasses avoid stress.

Soil testing helps you stay on top of your lawn’s pH and nutrient needs. If you’ve never done one, they’re simple. Your county extension agent can help with information and kits. If results find your lawn needs lime or other soil amendments, products such as Pennington Fast Acting Lime help restore balance so your lawn keeps looking its best.

Vibrant green grass depends on good nutrition. Pennington Ultragreen Lawn Fertilizer 30-0-4 feeds your lawn a premium blend of the nutrients grasses need most, and then keeps on feeding for up to three months. If your lawn needs a color lift, Ironite Mineral Supplement 1-0-1 By Pennington delivers color-enhancing iron and other nutrients to green grass up fast, for free maintenance garden try out playground turf. When bare lawn spots caused by outdoor entertaining, kid and pet play, or other challenges arise, a fast and effective lawn repair product delivers results. Pre-mixed, all-in-one Pennington One Step Complete turns bare spots into curb-appealing grass in two weeks or less.

ENHANCING FOUNDATION PLANTINGS

Shrubs, small trees and flowers planted around your home’s foundation accent your home’s best features. It’s important to think in terms of year-round appeal, and incorporate plants that fit the bill. “Evergreens” in colors from green and gold to blue with purple tinges provide color, texture and shape in every season.

Foundation plantings soften your home’s lines and help guide visitors’ eyes — and feet — straight to your entry door. Taller plants at building corners suggest extra width and don’t block views from inside. Decorative containers, dressed for the season, frame your doorway with color and life. Plants from side to side don’t have to match, but repeating similar plant types and shapes adds balance and beauty that attracts attention from the curb.

Plants such as ornamental grasses provide eye-catching movement and grace, while summer-blooming shrubs highlight your home long after spring’s explosion of blooms has passed. A complete, balanced fertilizer, such Pennington UltraGreen All Purpose Plant Food 10-10-10, provides foundation plants with solid nutrition to fuel healthy foliage and abundant blooms.

ADDING LANDSCAPE FOCAL POINTS

Planted alone as striking specimens or in combination with other plants, trees are landscape stars. They shade homes in summer and shield homes in winter, reducing cooling and heating costs, plus they buffer traffic noise and visibility. When it comes to curb appeal, focal points such as fountains, statuary or benches are often best left to private spaces. However, adding a single tree to your landscape can increase home value up to 2 percent.¹

Before you plant, check out the view from the curb and from inside. Trees act as natural focal points that cause your eyes to rest on them. They can draw attention away from undesirable areas, such as a neighbor’s uninviting wall, or focus attention on a pleasant view. They also help define property boundaries and provide cohesion between foundation plantings and your outer lawn.

Trees that have interesting or colorful bark, such as exfoliating white-barked birch trees or cinnamon-red paperbark maples, create landscape highlights that appeal with or without leaves. Keeping trees pruned of any damaged branches keeps them looking their best, and helps light reach grass and plants growing beneath.