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Best-care landscaping tips, beautiful outdoor spaces and more.
Bring Your Garden To Your Table – Braai Edition
February and March are our last two months of summer before the weather starts cooling down. Make the best of the hot weather by having a green and unique braai with family and friends, which will be sure to impress and leave life long memories.
Get A Jump On Cool Season Vegetable Gardening
It’s the end of the summer and temperatures are finally cooling down. Your vegetable garden may be looking a little tired with many plants having gone to flower and seed. Now is the time to do a general tidy up in your veggie patch, remove what you now longer want to make room for new plants and rotate your crops
How To Build A Fire Pit
Staying warm while still using and enjoying your garden space in Winter can be challenging with all the cold rain and freezing temperatures. Having a fire pit in the garden is one way to prolong an evening outdoors around a cosy fire with good company or just you and the stars above.
Bougainvilleas – So Bright And Bold
One of the few plants making a splash at this time of the year are the beautiful Boungainvillea cultivars! From white to pale orange, bright pinks and deep magentas, there are a lot of vibrant ones available these days.
Architectural Plants
Today’s blog is list of plants, shrubs and trees which can be used as architectural form plants to create an eye catching piece in your garden. By adding a couple of carefully chosen plants, trees and shrubs one can go far to increasing the appeal of your garden and adding interest and dimension
Favourite Flowers for the Autumn Garden
Gardeners tend to get excited about spring, looking forward to trying out new plants and maybe even making a big move and changing their landscapes. And in summer there’s the joy of the garden in full bloom, and most fruit trees and vegetable gardens produce abundantly.
Butterflies in the garden
Everyone is charmed by butterflies! They represent metamorphosis, hope through change and are symbolic of the life-cycle of all living things. Some are brilliantly patterned and coloured with kaleidoscopic markings.
Let Your Garden Shine
So you’ve spent hours perfecting your garden; considered the most functional layout, the prettiest features, comfortable furniture, interesting plants, and your lawn is your personal victory. It’s such a pleasure to have such a beautiful and calm space to enjoy.
Bird Feeders and Beyond – Everything You Need to Know
Autumn is usually a good time of year for the birds in your garden as many plants have gone to seed by now and are providing our garden birds with regular food. However, seeding grasses and fruiting plants and trees provide flushes of food during the year, but never complete continuity.
Companion Planting for the Veggie Garden
It’s now a well-known fact that certain plants grow better when planted near to each other as they improve each other’s well-being and protect each other from attack by insect pests. Now this is the kind of gardening I like, letting Nature lead the way and do the work!
Child Safety in The Garden
Every year, many children are rushed to the hospital due to accidents that occur in the home and garden. Checking your garden is safe for the littlest members of your family is important and here are some tips and advice for making yours as safe as possible.
Artificial Greening – Our Growing Range of Artificial Plants
Don’t be fooled! Faux is the new cool! The new possibilities for using synthetic or ‘fake’ plants for greening up your interior and outdoor living spaces are reaching new heights, quite literally!
March is for Garden Maintenance
March is typically a very busy gardening month with a lot of gardening maintenance tasks that need to be done. It’s time to clear out the dead growth of summer, and make room for the new garden you can imagine!
Helpful Gardening Tips for March
March is a time of the year in the garden when you still have some hot days. In general, the climate starts cooling down and in particular night temperatures go down. So this is the time of the year when you still practice summer maintenance but at...
Gardening tips – weekly round-up – march
This week our gardening tips include our war on weeds, recycling and dealing with cutworms. MONDAY'S GARDEN WOES... How to deal with cutworms naturally Cutworm is a type of caterpillar and is specifically the larvae of a number of species of adult...
Garden Design Tips For The Birds!
With Summer in full swing and your summer garden design coming along nicely. Let's think about the birds that are attracted to your garden! They are on a mission to fatten up before the cold of winter and can be seen looking for food. In the past,...
West Coast Garden Style: Gardening By The Beach
Summer is in full swing, but the deserved year-end holiday is still a few weeks away. And I'm in the office just dreaming of where I would rather be…on a beach, in the sun, not far from home with mussels for lunch and fish potjie for supper. Well,...
17 Tips To Create Your Own Veggie Garden
September and October are traditionally the best months in the Cape for sowing seeds and transplanting seedlings from trays into the veggie garden, but with the seasons a little late this year, there is no time like the present. In this helpful DIY...
10 Tips For Saving Water
Having brought you water-saving tips for your Summer garden. We are featuring further tips provided by the team of House and Leisure. Advice from Ernst van Jaarsveld… Ernst van Jaarsveld’s, author of the Waterwise Gardening book, was interviewed by...
DIY Rain Chains
So what is a rain chain anyway? Rain chains were first used in commercial buildings and modern houses to get rid of the need for downpipes connected to roof gutters. Instead of the rain water being channelled down a sometimes ugly-looking downpipe, the rain runs off the roof
Designing with Fynbos
We are extremely fortunate in South Africa to be living in a country with one of the highest biodiversity ratings in the world. In South Africa we have approximately 23,000 unique plant species, compared with Europe with approximately 10,000.
10 trendy landscaping plants for low-maintenance gardens you may not know of
Lately, walking through some of the residential projects installed by Contours Design Studio, I noticed some unusual plants making a regular appearance. Many of these you might not know yet, but welcome them into your garden and they will reward you with their hardy, versatile and attractive presence.
10 Great Tips to Starting Your Own Veggie Garden
The return to a much more wholesome way of eating seems to be taking off in many households, as people become more conscious of where their food comes from and how it gets to your plate.
5 Eco-Friendly Ways to Make Use of Autumn Leaves
When I think of Autumn, rich reds, bright yellows and robust orange leaves come to mind. Although beautiful, autumn leaves can become a hassle to clean up. Instead of throwing the leaves in the trash, rather make the most of them – help your garden grow or beautify your home.
All abuzz about Urban Beekeeping
The saying goes that everything is better (and sweeter) with a touch of honey. Urban beekeeping is a popular, growing trend for 2014. City residents worried about the global decline of bee populations have taken to urban beekeeping to do their part.
ARTIFICIAL GRASS LAWNS – WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW BEFORE YOU CONSIDER THIS OPTION
This is why we at Cape Contours Landscape Solutions are loving artificial lawn right now! If you have a new area of lawn you want done, then fake grass is well worth considering in light of our water crisis in the Cape.
All About Home Composting
All living things, including green plants, have the same basic needs as us! Food, Water, Air and Protection against the elements. In nature, plant food is found in the soils they are growing in, and so it makes sense that if that food is of poor quality, the plant will not thrive.
8 Low Cost Ways to Enhance Your Garden
With Summer in full swing, we bear witness to a multitude of green coloured plants sprouting everywhere! We can all agree that with the current cost of living, we have to make smart choices in our “gardening budgets.”
7 Garden Design Tips for Small Spaces
The desire to maximise a small space for many different functions and can often cause one to try and cram too much into a small space, creating a rather messy and cluttered feel.
Don’t let looks deceive you! These charming ornamental blooms are harmful and illegal!
We’re flipping the other side of the coin today to discuss 10 culprit plants and weeds that are often kept in gardens for their pleasing or extraordinary looks and ornamental value. But many gardeners do not understand the harmful impact of keeping...
How to combine edibles & ornamentals in your garden
Over the years we have written many articles regarding edible herb, vegetable and fruit gardening. We also covered ornamental gardening and landscaping. Never have we written about these two gardening worlds and principles, meeting and becoming...
Winter gardening woes and how to solve them
We are now at the beginning of our winter months and with the season change, we as gardeners face new challenges in our garden – from the weather itself to the pests and fungi that become prevalent in the winter months. We’re sharing some tips to...
Proteaceae 101: A step-by-step guide to growing them successfully
A mighty Proteaceae! Indigenous to the Cape Floristic Kingdom and exported worldwide for their magnificent long-lasting flowers and bracts. Proteas and plants within the Proteaceae family are not a rare sight here in the Western Cape, where they...
10 trendy landscaping plants for low-maintenance gardens you may not know of
Lately, walking through some of the residential projects installed by Contours Design Studio, I noticed some unusual plants making a regular appearance. Many of these you might not know yet, but welcome them into your garden and they will reward...
Contours favourite 5: Pond, Topiary & Scented plants
Today’s blog is an article with three lists of common gardening situations with five plants or trees listed per topic which we would choose for this situation. These are for each topic the most popular and are not all which you can choose. These...
Lawn: Which type to choose and how to plant
Today’s blog will provide you with some essential information on the different grass types in South Africa. This blog is a continuation, or rather chapter two of the last lawn blog. The last lawn blog provides essential information on how to grow...
Lawn Care: Tips to success and how to grow successfully
The topic Contours Landscapes will cover today, deals with lawn care and how to succeed with lawn. Lawn care is a long topic and one which is quite detailed. However, once you have the basics and stick with them you should be able to succeed in...
