Maintaining a garden is laborious and time consuming task. Regular gardening chores like watering, weeding, mowing and pruning take lot of time and effort, more if you’re a busy or old person.
You can reduce these chores by implementing low maintenance garden ideas in your garden. A low maintenance garden bestows maximum pleasure and minimum effort, means you can enjoy your garden more than ever.
Keep your garden simple
Keep your garden simple; apply low maintenance landscaping and designs. Eliminate all the fancy and fragile stuffs from your garden. Be selective on water features: A pond requires lot of maintenance, either design it for easy care or remove it. Don’t flood your garden with lot of plants growing hither and thither, grow them in appropriate conditions.
Mulching
Do mulching, it helps to retain moisture in soil that means less watering. Second, it doesn’t let weeds to pop out because mulch covers the ground and weeds don’t get air and sunlight to thrive, which means less weeding. Third, mulching improves the texture and health of your garden soil. You can use almost any organic matter for mulching: egg shells, banana peels, twigs, branches, paper, wood chipping or leaves.
Grow low maintenance plants
Grow low maintenance plants that don’t need deadheading, pruning and shearing quite often. Some common plants are rosemary, lavender, primrose, lantana, four o’clock and periwinkle, grow them in sunny space of your garden. Grow snowdrop, euphorbia, hellebore, ferns and ornamental grasses in part shade.
Replace or reduce your lawn
Don’t you agree that maintaining a lush green lawn is most cumbersome gardening task? Of course, a lawn compliments the borders of garden and provide a green space, but it needs regular watering, mowing, and fertilizing than no other gardening feature.
Replace or reduce your lawn with trees and shrubs in the corners and deck or paving slabs or gravels in the middle.
More Garden Paths, Less Containers
Make garden paths so you can reach every corner of garden briskly from compost bin to flower beds and everywhere else. Garden paths not only save time but they don’t let weeds grow, too. Read more about garden paths.
Avoid using containers if you can grow a plant on beddings, because container grown plant demands efforts— frequent watering, feeding more fertilizers and repotting and if you’re growing in containers, use large ones.
Decrease Watering Time
Install automated watering system in your garden to satiate watering needs of plants and save your watering time. With the least effort of setting up its timer and watering intervals, it’ll do its work. These types of watering systems are available for both containers and garden beds.
You can also use polymer crystals in potting soil while planting a new plant in container, these crystals reduce the need of watering.
Additional Tips
Use slow release fertilizers, so you’ll not need to fertilize more and often, these fertilizers release nutrients for months, gradually and constantly.
Grow pest and deer resistant plants like lavender, marigold, basil and sage; these plants will repel pest, deer and rabbit from your garden.
Grow slow growing plant, slow growing plants don’t need regular pruning and care.
Grow more hardy perennials than annuals, annuals are tough to maintain.
Do companion planting, grow plants with similar requirements closely.
