Making Your Home Safer Starts In The Yard: The Gardening Task That Can Keep Thieves Away

Taking care of your yard involves a variety of gardening tasks, from mowing and raking to seeding and watering. If having a beautiful yard is important to you, adding a regular yard care routine like these 10 weekly habits can help you achieve that picture-perfect yard you're envisioning. What's more, your landscaping habits could affect the security of your home. One gardening task, in particular, can have a big impact on protecting your home and making it unattractive to burglars: pruning the hedges and trees near the house. 

Since most homeowners love their privacy, it's very natural to want to create privacy screens around front porches and in the front yard. One popular choice is to plant bushes and hedges that prevent passersby from seeing into your windows. The problem with these living privacy screens is that they also give potential burglars plenty of places to hide, which makes your home a good target for break-ins.

With tall hedges in front of your windows, you provide potential intruders with a protected place to break in without ever being seen from the road or by your neighbors. Since most burglaries occur between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m., and generally last less than 10 minutes overall, fewer people are home during the day making it even harder for unusual activity to be detected. You can get home security cameras and place them in the proper places for maximum results, but if you have created hiding places for burglars with your hedges and trees, those hedges could inadvertently block your camera views as well.

As pretty and private as tall hedges can be, they make your home more attractive to a burglar. Keep the hedges and bushes around your front porch and front window area no taller than 3 feet. If your hedges are currently taller than 3 feet, you can measure to find the 3-foot height and start trimming them down. You should apply the 3-foot guideline to all your ornamental grasses and other plants in the front yard, too. 

You want to ensure that you have a clear line of sight from your windows to your driveway, to the street in front of your house, and to other neighbors' yards. Blocking your windows with tall hedges or foliage can limit your views to keep an eye on activities and your camera's view to record unusual activity. It can also prevent burglars from being seen from the road or from your neighbors' houses, which makes it more difficult for others to notice what's happening.  Neighborhood watches can be a real help when it comes to watching out for each other, but if all your neighbors see when they look over at your home is tall hedges, it won't do you much good.

Basement or first floor windows are typically the target for entry by a burglar. Plant thorny or prickly hedges in front of those windows to make it a lot harder to enter there without getting stuck by thorns. Keeping them low eliminates a place for the burglars to hide while they are trying to get in. Pruning your hedges and greenery regularly, along with applying other inexpensive tips that can help protect your home, can help reduce the risk of break-ins.