Gardens are an absolute joy for many people. They gain enormous pleasure from puttering around in their garden, planting, weeding, pruning, and watching their efforts blossom. But maintaining a garden can be time consuming, and if you have a busy career and/or a family, you might not have a lot of spare time to devote to your garden.
As we all know, neglecting a garden is a bad idea. Weeds soon take over and before you know it, your well-tended flower beds are a tangled jungle of unruly vegetation and your lawn is a hot mess. It isn’t ideal and is definitely not somewhere you can chill out in the summer.
One way to ensure your garden is in tip-top condition is to hire a gardening service like Jim’s Mowing & Gardening. Professionals can come in and mow your lawn, weed the borders, and take care of any pruning and planting. All you have to do is settle the bill and enjoy the fruits of their labor. But if you would rather get your hands dirty, a low-maintenance garden might be a better option.
Minimize Flower Beds and Borders
Design a low maintenance garden from day one and you can spend more time enjoying your garden than sweating buckets. To do this, reduce the number of flower beds you have since these are where the majority of the work lies.
Decking and Patios
Instead of borders, lay decking or a patio. Decking still requires maintenance, but it’s mostly a case of resealing the timber once a year rather than digging up weeds every weekend. If you do want to keep some flower beds, use weed membrane or thick mulch to keep weeds to a minimum and go for plants that offer excellent ground cover.
Get rid of your lawn. In the summer, grass needs cutting around twice weekly. In a large garden, this can easily take a couple of hours, which soon eats into your weekend. Replace a lawn with paving, gravel, and other hard surfaces. You can still plant things, but there will be a lot less upkeep.
Alternatively, if you have kids or pets, consider switching to artificial turf instead. Modern fake lawns look very natural and provide a long-lasting surface for pets and children to play on.
Pots and Planters
Planting flowers, annuals, herbs, and other small plants in pots and planters is a low-maintenance way to add color and interest to your garden. For instant color, fill a selection of pots with vibrant bedding plants. When they die back in late summer/early autumn, replace them with annuals. You could also fill pots up with flowering bulbs for a great display of color in spring.
Container gardening is ideal for low-maintenance gardeners. They are easy to move around and you can even plant veggies in containers.
Wildflower Gardens
A carefully cultivated garden is attractive, but don’t be afraid to let your garden become a wildlife haven. Sow a selection of wildflower seeds and let nature take its course. Carve out an area where you can sit and watch the local wildlife; your garden will take care of itself.
When planting, look for plant varieties that require minimal pruning and are very hardy.
