Homemade potting soil is very easy to make and cheaper than buying a commercial potting mix. By combing just a few ingredients, you can adjust DIY potting mix recipes for any of your potted plants. Homemade potting mix recipes can use peat moss, perlite, compost, sand, coco coir, or composted wood bark.

Hardy flowering perennials are colorful plants that add color, scent, and visual appeal to your garden landscape. Hardy perennials grow in most zones, and their flowers come back year after year despite harsh, freezing winters. Some resilient perennial flowers are coneflowers, daylilies, gaillardia, salvia, astilbe, and peonies.

Tall flowering perennial plants add stunning splashes of color and vertical visual appeal in any garden. Tall, elegant plants that flower year after year are perfect for creating a dramatic landscape backdrop. Colorful spring, summer, and fall flowers on the end of tall stems also serve as tall accents in privacy fences. Because the easy-care plants flower annually, there is less work to make your backyard beautiful.

Podocarpus plants are coniferous shrubs with dense evergreen foliage that make excellent lush, bushy low-maintenance hedges. The species Podocarpus macrophyllus also goes by the names fern pine, yew plum pine, and Buddhist pine. Although the Podocarpus plant is commonly called the Japanese yew, it’s not a true member of the Taxaceae family, which the yew belongs to.

Fast-growing ground cover plants are mat-forming, low-growing plants with vigorous growth. Some plants spread at an incredible rate and are ideal for covering large areas of bare soil or ground. Growing plants that spread fast over the ground also helps prevent soil erosion on slopes or hillsides and keep weeds under control. A benefit of fast-growing ground covers is that they don’t take much care to grow.