How To Choose the Best Child-Friendly Landscaping for Your Yard
Your home’s outdoor environment is a great place to relax and enjoy nature. An important aspect of this enjoyment is that the landscaping around your home is safe for family members of all ages. If you can enjoy your landscaping elements but have to worry every time your child is outside, then it’s time for a change. To help you in the process, here are some tips for choosing the best child-friendly landscaping for your yard.
Soft Materials for Play Areas
If you have a playground or other play structure in your yard, it’s important to take all necessary precautions to keep your children safe while they enjoy their time playing. One important part of this is to use mulch or some other soft material underneath the play structures. This provides a softer surface for children to land on when they misjudge the distance between the monkey bars. Keep in mind that normal dirt may not be adequate, as it can become quite hard during drought conditions.
Install Adequate Fencing
Fencing is just as useful for what it can keep in as it is for what it can keep out. If you have curious children, therefore, adequate fencing is a must to ensure they don’t wander off and away from your protection. Chain link fencing is adequate in most cases for this task, while a 6-foot privacy fence also protects your children from being spotted by stray dogs or curious onlookers.
Non-Toxic Plants
While a garden can be a beautiful addition to your backyard, it’s important that you choose plants for your garden that are safe to touch and eat, even if they aren’t plants that produce food. Since a curious child may decide to snack on certain plants in your garden, you want to ensure that doing so won’t end with a trip to the emergency room. Also important is to utilize landscape maintenance services to ensure no poisonous plants such as poison ivy have a chance to take root in your yard.
Make Cement Safer
Having a large cement patio for riding bikes or playing basketball is a great idea, until, at least, someone falls and gets their skin scraped up by the rough concrete. One way to prevent this is to coat the concrete in epoxy. The epoxy will provide a much smoother surface over a longer period to ensure that falls result in nothing more than injured pride.
Since most backyard materials aren’t necessarily made with children in mind, it’s important to try and see your backyard from a child’s point of view to ensure it’s safe. Get down on their level and look around to make sure there are no hidden hazards you hadn’t noticed before. While you may not catch everything, this will give you a much better chance of providing a safe space in which your children can play.
By Meghan Belnap / Blogger, Researcher and Freelance Writer
Meghan Belnap is a freelance writer who enjoys spending time with her family. She loves being in the outdoors and exploring new opportunities whenever they arise. Meghan finds happiness in researching new topics that help to expand her horizons. You can often find her buried in a good book or out looking for an adventure. You can connect with her on Facebook right here and Twitter right here.
Leave a Reply
Want to join the discussion?Feel free to contribute!