Make your most gorgeous, eco-friendly, and low maintenenance property dreams a reality with CORE Foundations and CORE Glow.

Landscaping is a powerful, long-lasting way to give your home and garden a fresh look, whether you’re planning a small change or remodeling entirely. With Core Foundations tips, we’re here to give you a few gentle nudges towards your dream, eco-friendly and low maintenance  property. Turn your front and back yard into a modern wonderland filled with rambling pathways, inviting social spaces, gorgeous foliage, and food for local pollinators. Whatever your vision, we have five landscaping tips that will make your property beautiful, reduce maintenance time, save on water usage, and help improve your local ecosystem!

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1. Update your base materials: choose gravel, ground covers, and drought-tolerant gardens over a standard lawn.

“Conventional lawn maintenance has proven to be detrimental to our soil, creates poor drainage, is harmful to wildlife and pollutes our water.” - Healthy Yards https://www.healthyyards.org/professionals/why-less-lawn/

With gravel-based landscaping, you can create walkways, garden scenes, and gorgeous textured surfaces that require no watering.  In many municipalities you even get a rebate for your water-saving efforts!  Using Core Foundation grids for your gravel base ensures that aggregate stays put, creates a stable, wheelchair-accessible surfaces, prevents compaction and flooding, reduces weeds, and so much more.  There are gorgeous rock aggregates available locally that will make you rethink what ‘gravel’ can do. Using gravel to create walking paths, sitting areas, and water runoffs is a perfect way to incorporate water-saving areas into a beautiful lawn design. Along with your new rocky landscape we recommend planting hardy, drought-tolerant plants (even better if you choose plants that are food for local pollinator species).  

Core Foundations Pro Tip: When you dig up your lawn, use the extra soil and organic material to create raised garden beds! Once the ground is level, place Core Foundation grids down and fill with gravel for an astoundingly quick way to create your new #dryscape surface. Don’t forget to check in with your municipality - you may be eligible for a significant rebate!

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2. Stunning Sections: Unique Edging

One easy way to give your property stunning texture and curb-appeal is with unique edging.  Use any material you desire, from brick and wood to river stones and metal edging. Each option gives a unique look and feel to your lawn and fits with any home style.  For rustic farmhouses and ranchettes, metal or wood edging will carry on the country feel of your home. For modern homes or larger sprawling estates, river stones will continue the bright and contemporary lines your house boasts.  Brick edging will make smaller lawns pop while wood from railroad ties is great if you’re lucky enough to find this versatile reclaimed material. By edging sections of your lawn, you can craft a walkable story, going from herb garden to home garden, then pollinator food forest to personal nature sanctuary. 

Core Foundations Pro Tip: Keep your new edging in place and well-drained by using Core Foundation panels beneath as a solid, permeable foundation. This will reduce puddles, keep your edging clean, prevent weeds, and keep your edging in place. 
Core Foundation System Packs are great for light to heavy-duty foundation support.

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3. The Ordinary: Paving Stones

For a simple but stunning upgrade to your landscape, consider installing paving stone pathways and boulder sitting areas.  Paving stones will create a unique look for your lawn or backyard. Whether used for paths or sitting areas, paving stones draw the eye by creating a clean space set apart for walking or sitting.  These are especially useful if creating a multi-story backyards with varied garden sections. To create an inviting landscape that beckons friends and family alike for a stroll, paving stones are the way to go. 

Core Foundations Pro Tip: Place paving stones directly on Core Foundation panels, then add gravel around the paving stone for a flush, stable finish.

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4. The Unique: Glow Stones for enchanting gardens and reducing light pollution

“A growing body of evidence links the brightening night sky directly to measurable negative impacts including: Increasing energy consumption, disrupting the ecosystem and wildlife, and harming human health” - International Dark Sky Association, https://www.darksky.org/light-pollution/

If you are looking for a unique edge, then you’ll want to invest in our incredible Core Glow stones.  Glow stones appear like ordinary gravel stones during the day, but they use the sun’s rays to light up and glow at night. The soft-glow will draw you outside on those mellow summer nights, and the gentle glow is bright enough to light your path without outshining the stars in the night sky. For more info on how Core Glow helps reduce light pollution, check out www.coreglow.ca/lightpollution

You can choose colors to match your landscaping, all stones are a gentle white during the day, then glow in aqua, green, or blue. They also come in numerous shapes and sizes. Use glow stones to create a unique vignette such as a pathway during the day, which becomes a well-lit walkway during the night.  Line your garden beds or lawn edging to distinguish the start of your yard from your driveway. Line small ponds, sitting areas, or fountains to create an enchanting scene when the sun goes down.  Glow stones serve as a unique option to personalize your landscape in a way that is stunning and functional.

Core Glow Pro Tip: Core Glow stones are best used to reduce night-time light pollution! Choose an area that gets lots of sun during the day, then turn out all of the lights at night. Not only will this lessen your local light-pollution, it will allow you to enjoy the gorgeous, gentle glow of Core Glow. 
Get Core Glow at www.coreglow.ca

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5. Endless Options: Plants, plants, and more plants!

One of the best win-win solutions of low maintenance land care and beautiful, eco-friendly landscaping is choosing indigenous, hardy plant species for your biogeoclimatic region. Not only have these plants specifically evolved to thrive in your climate, they also help feed local pollinator species and increase biodiversity, a hallmark of resilient, strong ecosystems. 

Core Foundations Pro Tip: For more information on how to select the best plants for your climate-region, the ‘Plant Wisely’ section of Healthy Yards is a great place to start. https://www.healthyyards.org/homeowners/plant-wisely/

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6. The Incredible: Eco-friendly properties save money, time, and help our planet thrive!

Ok, there is one more point we love sharing with you. We love that it makes financial sense to turn your lawn into a drought-tolerant, low-maintenance, and absolutely stunning property - that is our mission here at Core Landscape Products. We are committed to helping create affordable, permeable systems to help you in this transition to creating urban landscapes that are beautiful, biodiverse, and help support your local ecosystem, and have this be an accessible choice for every homeowner. 

For more information on all the incredible ecosystem benefits of using Permeable Systems that require little maintenance, no pesticides, no mowing, and no watering, keep an eye out for our upcoming article on the subject!