We love our home, our garden and everything in between. I myself pay particular attention to my garden. I love how it provides a beautiful welcome and enhances our house. Everybody knows that the front yard or the garden is something that you should never leave to itself, if you don't want weeds and strange shrubs turning your pretty garden into a miniature jungle. Though an excellent garden and yard has a tendency to be high-maintenance, there are ways to reduce it with these tips:

1. Sometimes we feel beautiful gardens and meticulously-tended yards are only for homes with a million-dollar value and for those wealthy people who doesn't balk at $1,000 as budget for landscaping projects. My mother doesn't need a huge space for a garden or a big budget for it. It amazes me what she can do with a simple D-I-Y for her gardening and her seemingly magical green thumb. People often complain about how they can't also manage their own gardens because they don't have a talent for it, or would never want to get their hands dirty.

- Be willing to learn how to work the weeds out, plant by yourself and

- Learn to fertilize on your own. Although experts believe that only pros should do this, there are gardeners out there doing the fertilizer on their own. There are risks involved because some fertilizers have chemicals that you don't want splattered on any part of your body.

2. Periodic pruning can be done on your own. Though it might not usually look like what the pros do, at least it's not the tight look with sharp contours. Sometimes you should let bushes look like a normal bush, not weird shapes and figures. Keep it in shape with a heavy-duty hand pruner. Clip some limbs and overgrown branches, monitoring your own work lest you might make a mistake and prune too much.

- Invest in a good garden hose, long enough to reach tall trees and thick shrubs, something durable that consumes less water, and preferably with a gentle spray feature if you have fragile plants in your yard.

3. Start on small projects. Instead of thinking about landscaping and gardening as a huge event that needs lots of preparation, try to do it in a manner that's focused on one thing at a time. If you need more plants and flowers, take a month to be able to plan, apply and wait while the first shoots grow. If you need some trees, do some research about D-I-Y planting of young trees into your yards. Start small and focus on one thing instead of doing it all the changes you planned at one time.

- You're better off by using a pail and a bucket but in the end it's too time consuming and thus not cost-effective.

- Watch gardening shows or subscribe to YouTube for free D-I-Y gardening tutorials

4. When watering your garden, don't rely on the lawn sprinklers. It will only waste your water because more often than not it misses vital pots of plants, shrubs and trees which need water the most. And even if you seem to think that the sprinkle does reach them, it might be not enough thus leaving your plants to suffer and become dehydrated. The sprinkler also isn't good for thick-leaved plants because 80% of the water will go to the leaves, trickle down and very little will actually penetrate through the branches and into the roots.