If You Want Your Yard to Sparkle at Night, Try This!
5 Materials
$200
2 Hours
Easy
I love planting flowers, foliage and trees in our yard and enjoy it all by day.
But when the sun goes down, our yard really sparkles.
Why?
We've been playing with different ways to light it all up (the DIY way, of course).
This summer's focus has been to switch out some of my old incandescent lighting with more durable, efficient, and energy-saving LED lights. I've got a great head start on it, but it's so much fun to "night garden" that I'll continue to tweak and experiment...just like I do with my day garden.
Here's my lighted Pachysandra Berm from last year (there's a post about it here on Hometalk)
It was really pretty, but I had to keep replacing light strings every year.
So, this year I replaced them all with warm white LED string lights:
The LED lights required only one extension cord because you can string up to 18(!!!) of the strands end to end. Bonus: one strand of 150 lights uses about 80% LESS energy that "traditional" string lights.
This photo was taken the same evening I installed them. A few weeks later, the lights and cords have settled into the plants so it's more of a subtle sparkle and glow effect.
But wait, there's more!
I also hung LED market/cafe style lighting throughout the yard...
and have been uplighting trees as well....
I liked it so much, I lit my mom's trees, too!
Everything is set up using light-sensing timers. Mine are set to light for a 2 to 4 hour period after dusk.
The cost and time estimates provided are just that...much depends on how good of a bargain shopper you are, how big your yard is, how much you plan to light, and if you use some of what you already have. Just as I add plants to my day garden, my night garden contains a collection of lights that I add to each year. The first year, I spent $30; last year, I spent about $100 on spot lights, this year, I bought some cafe lights. This is an ongoing project because I truly enjoy playing with it.
If you'd like to try this in your yard, you can probably figure out most of this on your own, like we did. But if you need some help, please visit the blog post below (which I will continue to update as I tweak) for more photos, a hasty video tour, and links to each of the different types of lighting and sources we use.
Happy night gardening!
Want more details about this and other DIY projects? Check out my blog post!
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2 comments
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So many different, great options! Thanks for sharing!
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