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Limestone is a white-colored rock that you’ll often see on display in people’s gardens. Adding limestone is often done to improve the aesthetics of a property, but will adding limestone to your lawn, flower bed, and throughout your garden have benefits beyond visual appearances?
Limestone is good for landscaping. Limestone contains nutrients that prolong the lifespan of your plants while enhancing growth. Limestone can also be used to protect your lawn against toxins. The alkaline nature of limestone can also be used to reduce acidity in the soil.
This article will take an in-depth look at using limestone for landscaping purposes. I’ll explain some things you need to know before getting started.
Things To Know Before Using Limestone for Landscaping
Limestone is an inexpensive and practical addition to your garden landscape. Using limestone has many fantastic benefits for the aesthetics and plant health of your property. However, misusing limestone could pose issues to your garden and severely harm your plant life.
In order to safely use limestone for landscaping, remember these points, and your garden will thrive:
1. Limestone Is Nutrient Rich
Plants require more than just water and sunlight to live a long and healthy life. Your plants also draw nutrients from their surroundings, especially the soil, that help them to flourish. If you can increase the nutrient content in the earth, your plants will have access to more of them.
One easy way of improving the nutrient content in your soil is by sprinkling crushed limestone across your flower beds. Using crushed limestone is crucial as the tiny pieces of limestone can be absorbed by the earth.
Once the soil absorbs the added limestone, the plants can suck up the added nutrients through their roots. This process improves the soil quality, as your plants have easy access to an abundance of beneficial nutrients.
Limestone is rich in calcium, and most plants need calcium. Calcium aids plants’ photosynthesis, increases ammonium in the soil and helps plants absorb other vital nutrients like phosphorus and potassium (source).
Increasing the calcium will also promote larger fruits and vegetables during harvest.
2. Protect Your Lawn With Limestone
Another important use for limestone is keeping your lawn healthy. Lawn care can be a tricky process—there are many ways things can go wrong, and patches of your yard can die. One threat that people often encounter is toxins accumulating in their lawns.
If the handful of toxins that can form on your lawn reach too high levels, they can cause your lawn to change color and die. Luckily, you can prevent this from happening by spreading ground limestone across the yard. It comes in either a powder or granular form and can be purchased online (link to Amazon).
Adding limestone to your lawn also protects it against drought, sun damage, and foot traffic. When properly used, the limestone allows the lawn to remain green and healthy throughout the year.
For best results, you should lime your lawn twice yearly: in fall and spring. Distributing the limestone at this time has excellent results. It protects your property against the harsh summer sun, and the changes in weather in the fall allow the limestone to be quickly absorbed into the soil.
3. Limestone Lowers Acidity in Soil
Limestone contains magnesium phosphate and calcium carbonate, which is an alkaline substance. As a result, adding limestone to an acidic mixture will reduce its acidity and give you control over the pH levels. This will improve clicking conditions for the plants growing on your property.
If your soil becomes overly acidic, it can affect your plant’s ability to grow and develop. You can use limestone to prevent the acidity levels from increasing beyond manageable levels.
Most plants and crops like the soil to be slightly acidic, with a PH rating of between 6 and 7. Limestone is slightly alkaline, with a PH of between 7 and 8. As a result, if the PH in your soil drops below 6, you can add some lime to increase it slowly back to an ideal figure (source).
It’s crucial that you don’t overuse limestone when trying to correct the PH in your soil. Using too much limestone could increase the PH beyond the desired levels and create harsh living conditions for your plants. (See How To Identify And Manage Alkaline Soil).
4. Limestone’s Aesthetic Benefits
Limestone typically comes in a beautiful bright white color. This color creates a stark contrast against the dark colors you usually associate with soil and mulch. Limestone is also easy to shape and carve. Because of this, using limestone rocks in your garden gives you a lot of options for improving the aesthetics of your garden.
Limestone can be used for installing walkways, driveways, edges, and creating flower beds in your landscape. Limestone is long-lasting and durable, so you won’t have to worry about replacing them often.
For example, you could use limestone to create a footpath. You simply have to remove the sod from the path you want to use, lay some landscaping fabric, and fill the path with pieces of limestone. You can also use limestone to cover landscaping areas where it’s too hard to maintain mulch or grass.
Limestone comes in a few different pale colors, giving you the opportunity to mix them up and design a landscape that suits your taste.
On top of these benefits, limestone is a relatively affordable material. You can get stylish limestone landscaping without breaking the bank.
Final Thoughts
Limestone is a beautiful material that you can use to improve your landscaping. Limestone offers numerous benefits for plant health, including improving the soil nutrient content. Limestone also reduces acidity and allows you to maintain the soil at an ideal PH for growing plants.
On top of this, limestone is also excellent at protecting your lawn against a number of threats. Limestone can prevent sun damage and lawn toxins from accumulating. For best results, sprinkle your soil with ground limestone in the spring and again in the fall. This will keep your lawn healthy throughout the year.
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