How To Make Your Garden As Low Maintenance As Possible

I love our garden, but I don’t love the gardening. To keep it looking good takes regular time and effort. From cutting the grass to pruning and weeding I never really manage to keep on top of it, but I’m lucky that I have family who enjoy gardening and they help out. If you don’t have family to help out, and you don’t want to have a gardener then there is another way. If you make your garden as low maintenance as possible you can spend more time enjoying your garden and less time looking after it. Here are some helpful hints and tips if you want to make your garden easier to look after.

Long grass and a slide in the background

Lawn

If you have a grass lawn it needs cutting regularly. If you want it to look really good you will probably want to water it in summer as well as spending time removing moss and other weeds. An alternative that lots of people are turning to is artificial grass like this from LazyLawn because it is really easy to maintain. You won’t have to worry about weeds growing through and it doesn’t need cutting, plus if you have children it is great for them to play on all year around without getting muddy. Artificial grass now looks really realistic, but if it isn’t for you then you might want to put paving down or one of the many varieties of pebbles or chippings.

Plants

Some plants need more regular attention than others, if you have any that are high maintenance then swapping them for ones which need less looking after like hardy shrubs, bushes and borders can reduce the amount of time you have to spend gardening. Some plants may be easier to look after if you put them in pots, but in the summer potted plants often need regular watering so you need to balance this out.

Weeding

How much time do you spend uprooting weeds ? Probably quite a lot if you want a neat garden. You can reduce the number of weeds that grow with some changes to your garden e.g. by putting down a weed-suppressing membrane in your flower beds and planting hardy shrubs in small holes cut into it. The shrubs will grow much easier and you don’t need to water them as often due to the membrane. You can cover the membrane with some mulch to make it look more attractive.

Soil

Feeding your plants is so important to keep plants growing and it is one area of garden maintenance that is really worth doing, but you only need to think about putting down compost once a year to enrich your garden and make your plants much healthier. If you want to apply mulch the easy way without a membrane, then you need to cover your plant beds with the substance making sure that it is around 4-6 inches deep. This will serve a dual purpose. It will suppress weeds and it will also lock in some of the moisture.

Technology

If you find you spend a lot of time watering your garden than an automatic sprinkler system could be great. If you get one which covers your garden properly then you won’t need to water the garden manually and it will be well cared for.

***Disclosure: This is a collaborative post***