I have two planters on either side of the entrance with monkey grass in them, it gets nice and busy with a small bloom, best of all nothing kills it, no matter how hard you might try. I put a decorative metal bench on either side of the sliding doors centered on the barn front. It’s not fancy but that the extent of my landscaping. Right now it’s dirt in front as we are debating getting sod put down. I am a low maintenance kind of person so the least I have to take care of the better. Also, I live in a very snaky area so I try not to have places for snakes to hide out near buildings, like shrubs (that goes for the house too).
Mine was beautifully landscaped…then I moved in. Dear pony figured out how to escape his stall. I then secured him properly and after assessing his prison for 6 months figured his to escape, and punished my by letting 2 horse friends and 3 goats loose.
Now I have some lovely planters and a lot of dirt and mud (this time of year).
Next year I’ll attempt something low key- if I can keep satan pony confined.
Awesome replies and photos,…au-mazing. :yes:
Thank you guys!
Let’s see,…
ezduzit-‘stand out’ too much? In what way? Curious, as we also don’t really have any other neighbors with any kind of landscaping around their entry gates, etc,…
fatappy-that is gorgeous!! My old barn looked very similar, and I loved the window boxes and symmetry of your beds on each side of the barn aisle. Really lovely.
What do you have lining the edge of your beds?
I was thinking about doing holly also, but isn’t that poisonous? Of course, the horses are no where near it (it looks that way on yours also,…), just curious your thoughts on it.
I LOVE the fatsia too, very tropical looking and fills the area so well!
Thank you for the photos!
Potted plants and decorative containers/rock gardens definitely count as ‘landscaping’! And no one judges on weeds (ha, weeding? What’s that?), so please, post away on the pics!
Peteypie- Thanks for the gate links! Some of those are breathtaking.
We are going to do a metal pipe gate with mesh on the lower half (dogs), probably black ones if we can find it.
We are in the Pacific NW (just moved here from Southeast, hence the ‘new barn’ plans).
Fig- what barn in Tryon? I am from that area.
I love the simplicity of evergreens and ferns,…green adds so much to an otherwise metal ( or wood-whatever your barn is made of) “world”.
2DogsFarm- you HAVE to give us some photos of that lovely sounds landscaping to awe over. Sounds amazing.
eniskerry-lovely rose bushes. I love knockouts…and horses tend to not bother those much.
doublestable-wow! What a lovely tropical, warm landscape. I love it! Your new place sounds/looks like an amazing ‘blank slate’. Keep us updated on the progress!
In reading too, it is recommended to use plants that are not readily ‘flammable’ (a plant that is readily flammable, like a dead one?!), and obviously nonpoisonous to dogs/cats/horses if you have the like in the same area the plants will be…
I love bulbs-they are relatively inexpensive and come back year after year. One time expense, and there you go. They multiply like crazy too! Great for a fill of color.
I am contemplating willows also-they can get huge, but not poisonous, and fill quickly. I can keep them cut back, so they won’t get ‘huge’, but…
In the SE, we used a lot of crepe myrtles in our landscaping-lots of easy color and ‘tree-like’, well, supposed to be a bush, but most people shape them like trees.
Horses left them alone too.
What about fruit trees? I was thinking apples,…
In the hot SE climate, we couldn’t grow them (had a peach orchard though that I can’t have here,…), so I am excited to try some ‘cold hardy’ fruit trees, and I love permaculture/sustainable landscaping,…
Fatsia - I thought it was pot!!! LOL.
I have a window box, a couple azaela bushes, 2 hostas and that is it. The rest of the barnyard area is too accessible by horses, so no plants. I have to redo the landscaping at the end of my drive, but it’s hard to get water there, so I won’t do anything too demanding. I did plant 2 beautiful crimsom mums that look spectacular through the fall. Love mums.
Thank you!
I’m a bad horse owner and didn’t know holly was toxic… whoops. But none of my horses have done anything to cause me concern. I’ve been more concerned about my dog trying to eat the bumble bees that seem to enjoy the hollies. My vet mentioned it, but she wasn’t terribly concerned either. The impression I got was a horse would have to be pretty desperate to want to eat a holly, and mine are far from desperate.
This is the trim that i used for my beds. Super easy to use, and ‘bounces back’ if the horses walk on it.
If you are in the PNW, as I am, you will want to think about deer in planning landscaping. They don’t bother the stuff right by my barn (yet!), but anything else, including right by my house, is fair game for them. Unless you successfully fence them out. And all those plants labeled “deer resistant” at the nursery? Don’t count on that. I have a planter out by my arena that we stuck a couple of supposedly deer resistant plants in and they survived a month or so before the deer mowed them down. Deer don’t read labels!
For that reason, I tend to use herbs out in those places where deer are likely to browse. Catmint grows well, is attractive, bees love it, and deer won’t eat it. If I interplant other deer favorites, like petunias, they often grow well as the deer must not like nosing through the herbs to eat the yummy stuff. Other good thing about herbs, they don’t require a lot of watering or great soil to survive.
Around the barn, too, I’m careful about not making too friendly a habitat for unwanted critters. Like I won’t use low growing, spreading evergreens much as they are great hiding places for rodents and such. Fire is also a concern, so even though the barn will probably go up in a flash if we do get a wildfire here, I am still thinking “defensible space” in what we plant around it. So no trees nearby and lots of gravel, with only specific planters which stay watered in summer. Fire is on my mind today as our area heads into another red flag warning for high temps, low humidity, and wind!
[QUOTE=mountainhorse;7745903]
doublestable-wow! What a lovely tropical, warm landscape. I love it! Your new place sounds/looks like an amazing ‘blank slate’. Keep us updated on the progress!
In reading too, it is recommended to use plants that are not readily ‘flammable’ (a plant that is readily flammable, like a dead one?!), and obviously nonpoisonous to dogs/cats/horses if you have the like in the same area the plants will be…
I love bulbs-they are relatively inexpensive and come back year after year. One time expense, and there you go. They multiply like crazy too! Great for a fill of color.
I am contemplating willows also-they can get huge, but not poisonous, and fill quickly. I can keep them cut back, so they won’t get ‘huge’, but…
In the SE, we used a lot of crepe myrtles in our landscaping-lots of easy color and ‘tree-like’, well, supposed to be a bush, but most people shape them like trees.
Horses left them alone too.
What about fruit trees? I was thinking apples,…
In the hot SE climate, we couldn’t grow them (had a peach orchard though that I can’t have here,…), so I am excited to try some ‘cold hardy’ fruit trees, and I love permaculture/sustainable landscaping,…[/QUOTE]
Thanks 
it was fun and in Cali palms grow well - but not a good plant near horses. They LOVE them and will strip the fronds. Not toxic (however) since I own such special beasts, once the tree trimmer dropped a Queen palm frond in one of my horses stalls, unnoticed by me - My horse stripped the leaves, took it to my other horse to play together and a vet visit later because he had a palm thorn (they have thorns) in his chest.
Lemon trees are good… One of my horses LOVES eating the lemons… . they would roll down my hill and he would eat them. My other horses wouldn’t eat them. I don’t think they were toxic since he is still here to whinny about it.
I like potted plants. Love the window box fatappy!!
And thanks stb we are loving living on a orchard. Very peaceful.
Peteypie love the gate ideas.
One trick for using annuals easily if you don’t mind a bit of extra watering or running an irrigation set up like a drip hose is to “plant” an empty pot of the size and type you’ll get your plants in or will repot them into. Then you just drop potted annuals into the holes in the ground, no fuss about digging holes for them, etc. When they die off, lift out entire top pot, dump plant onto compost heap. No digging up dead plants.
(You’d want to be careful with the open holes though - around horses I might have pots filled just with dirt or mulch to set into the ground pots when there is no planting in them, so no one can accidentally step into a hole when it isn’t planted, like if you wanted to leave them empty all winter.)
Biggest catch is usually the watering, since being in the pots will make it harder for the plant to get moisture from the ground. So you do have to treat it more like a plant in a small planter than one actually in a flower bed. But if you don’t want the look of a planter it can be an easy way to add color without having to spent as much time kneeling down mucking around with caring for annuals, or even perennials that are not winter hardy in your area. (If you want with a perennial you can just move the plant indoors so it’ll survive the winter, then put it back out next season, repotting as growth requires.)
fun thread to glean ideas from! OP: ‘willows’…I love them too! BUT…they will wreck havoc if you have water lines anywhere ANYWHERE near. just be careful, they’ll invade pipes ruin the plumbing if its anywhere close.
