Outdoors Projects & Advice

You can look at pruning shrubs and trimming hedges as a chore, or you can look at it as a creative outlet. Many new gardeners don’t feel they are up to the task and put it off. But it’s much better if you start pruning your shrubs right away when they are young and continue to do minor annual pruning each year rather than let them get overgrown and end up needing major renewal pruning. Regular pruning also helps promote healthier shrubs that produce more blooms.

Landscape beds dress up a plain, green yard and provide supple ground for growing perennials, annuals, vegetables, or whatever greenscape you choose to plant. Use your imagination! The shape, size, and location of a landscape bed is really up to you. In the project shown here, you’ll learn how to create a landscape bed with curved edges by using a garden hose to outline the bed shape before you break ground. This bed features plastic edging, which is installed before amending soil.

Horseshoes has been played for thousands of years, and is an easy game to set up in the back or side yard. A permanent horseshoe pit is a fun, easy project to build.

If you’re looking for a fast-and-easy, down-and-dirty backyard project for kids, this sandbox is for you! At four-foot square, this is a great sandbox for the backyard. This versatile sandbox couldn’t be easier to build, yet it will delight kids of all ages and is very inexpensive to make.

Cornhole, also known as Beanbag toss was invented, by most accounts, during the darkness of the middle ages in Europe. Lost for centuries, it was rediscovered in the back woods of Kentucky in the 19th century. However, the basic idea of the game—throw something at a target—has existed uninterrupted for many thousands of years.