Fall Landscaping Tips to Improve Your Home’s Curb Appeal

Let’s face it, as summer wanes and fall sets in, your home’s landscaping can start looking a little worse for wear. But, as the temperatures cool down, it’s a great time to work on your landscaping and add some serious curb appeal. With some simple tasks and handy tricks, you can make your home look great in the fall. Read on for some awesome fall landscaping tips to improve your home’s curb appeal. Depending on the size of your front yard, you can take your landscape from drab to beautiful in a matter of a few hours this weekend.

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Add Lots of Fall Blooming Flowers for Curb Appeal

When planning and planting your flower beds in spring, always keep in mind adding perennial plants and flowers that will carry over and look great into fall. If you didn’t do that and your flower beds and landscape are looking rather shaggy and drab, no worries you can still add new plants now. Many garden centers carry perennial plants into late September. Just be sure your new plantings are watered up until the ground freezes. I like to add a slow-release fertilizer when I plant to help with root development which is especially important in the fall.

Blooming plants will definitely bring back pops of color to your garden beds. When planting your flower beds think about the bold colors of fall. Think russet colors with yellow and orange in marigolds, goldenrod and sneezeweed. Add in more fall colors with purple and mauve-colored plants, like asters, coral bells and sedum. Mums are classic fall flowers and add tons of bold color to your landscape. Ornamental grasses are a popular choice and look great in the fall season too.

Some of the summer annuals that you have in your gardens will perk up when temperatures cool down and will put on a fresh new round of blooms and even last through some light frosts. Examples of these annuals are snapdragons, sweet alyssum, celosia and gloriosa daisies.

For more ideas for fall blooming plants to add to your gardens, check out The Best Fall Perennial Flowers.

Adding potted plants is a wonderful way to welcome visitors, as well as adding tons of character and curb appeal to your home. Container gardens are a great way to fill in bare spots in your flower bed too. Mums, the big colorful plants, are a favorite for this use and just scream, “fall is here.”

If the idea of adding planters appeals to you, check out these posts:

Ideas for DIY Outdoor Fall Planters
Tips on Transitioning Container Gardens to Fall

Add Fresh Mulch to Take Your Fall Curb Appeal Up a Notch

A fresh layer of mulch helps to pull your garden beds together and give your home a nice and clean look from the street. Mulch also helps to protect your plants from the rapid swings in temperature that are so common in fall and during the winter months. If you want an easy project that helps make your fall landscape shine but offers some practical value as well, mulch is one of the most affordable and effective things you can do to spruce up your landscaping.

Fall Landscaping Tips – Tidy Up Perennials and Flower Beds

This can be a controversial subject, but when it comes to curb appeal, it looks much neater to cut back spent perennials. If you are concerned about pollinators having a place to overwinter, don’t cut back your perennials in your backyard. 

Prune plants to give your landscaping a cleaner appearance. Simply cut down browned foliage to a couple of inches from ground level and cover the plant with mulch. The dead plant debris can be added to your compost pile.

You can learn more about fall garden cleanup here. We also have a handy Fall garden maintenance and cleanup checklist. You can access it and lots of other awesome gardening printables in our gardening resources library, by completing the subscription form below.

This is a good time to kill grass and weeds in your sidewalk and driveway cracks. This tool is the absolute best for accomplishing this, and the best part – no chemicals are involved. Clean up the edging around flower beds and sidewalks too.

Fall Landscaping Tips – Spruce Up the Lawn

Fall leaves look great on trees, but not so much on the ground. Fallen leaves can tend to leave the yard looking unkempt and less than appealing. A great way to make the most of these leaves is to use them as an under-layer for your fresh fall mulch. This allows you to feed the soil and add more protection to your plants while saving money. Just pile up a few inches of fall leaves and top off with fresh mulch to make it look good. We use our lawn mower to shred the leaves and bag them. It makes it easier to spread them back out on the flower beds.

It’s a bit impractical, if you have lots of trees in your yard, to try and keep your lawn completely free of leaves. Just do the best you can, but do try to keep the driveway and sidewalks clear. We find that a lightweight leaf blower works best for this.

As the heat of summer moves its way out you find yourself with thin spots in your lawn. Now that it’s cool, take the opportunity to reseed these bare spots, as cooler temperatures are more conducive to starting grass seed. This will give your lawn a huge head start next season.

To make your yard look neat and tidy for the last few weeks of fall give your lawn one more mow. That should tide it over until next year and help keep it looking great. For more information about about the care of your lawn and fall lawn care tips, check out this post by the University of Minnesota.

Fall Landscaping Tips – Clean the Outside of Your Home

Fall is the perfect time to give the front of your home a good cleaning. First, use a leaf blower to clean up leaves and other debris away from the house. Next, use a power washer to clean landscaping bricks, edging, and sidewalks to make everything look great again. If you have a driveway, a porch, or even your siding in the front of your home, you can benefit from power washing these as well to make your home look its best.

Add Fall Decorations to Create Curb Appeal

I’m not much into Halloween, but I love going all out with outdoor fall decor- creating little vignettes in the gardens, around the porch and any place that is visible from the street. Just putting together a grouping of a planter filled with fall blooms with some pumpkins around the base, can add lots of fall character to your home and be an attractive part of your fall landscaping.  

Our favorite outdoor space in the fall is our fire pit area. Early fall is the ideal time to tidy up your fire pit area and get it ready for the cooler months ahead.

Here are some of my favorite festive and cute, handmade Fall decor items. If you too love decorating your outdoor spaces for Fall, you’ll find some great ideas in these posts:

Fall Porch Decor and Outdoor Decorating Ideas
Fall Flower Garden Inspiration (Plus Outdoor Decor Ideas)

So really, you can see these ideas and tips for adding curb appeal to your home in the fall, won’t take much time at all. Plus, it’s invigorating to get outdoors and enjoy the cool, crisp autumn air. Make it a family affair and include children. Do you have a tip or idea of your own to share? If so, feel free to leave a comment below.

Happy gardening,

Joanna

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