Paul Bickford/NNSL photo
This year's Yards in Bloom competition is about to begin.
Yard viewings by volunteers will take place from July 19 to 26 inclusive for the contest, which is presented by the Hay River Beautification Committee.
As with last year, interested people are being asked to register online to have volunteers view their yards.
"We're giving people until midnight on July 18 to enter," said Linda Carman, the co-ordinator for Yards in Bloom.
All entered flower gardens will be viewed and judged by volunteers with the owner present.
The contest has several categories: master garden, amateur funky garden, amateur town and country garden, and community flower container.
There are at least two prizes for each of six regions in the community.
Carman noted that Yards in Bloom is putting a lot of emphasis on self-entry.
She explained that, up until 2017, volunteers would walk through neighbourhoods in search of interesting yards.
"And for that we required at least four volunteers per region," she said. "So we needed a minimum of 24 volunteers to accomplish that. But we got to a point where we felt like we had been doing it enough years that we were burnt out and we felt that it was time to kind of get people to graduate to self-entering themselves."
After skipping 2018 to refocus the competition, Yards in Bloom returned last year with self-entry.
"We started to try to do it last year, and we learned from our first experiences," said Carman. "We learned that we needed to be more of a social media presence, because a lot of people are on social media. And so we wanted to reach that group and we also wanted to reach some younger people who are out there doing gardening, because we're seeing them at the garden centres."
She noted that people are also encouraged to nominate other people's yards, and the nominees will be asked if they want to enter the contest.
There is no registration fee for Yards in Bloom.