While you love working in the garden and the peace and tranquillity you can create, you don’t want to necessarily dedicate hours upon hours a week to maintain it, particularly as you get older and might not have the energy you once had. A low-maintenance garden – or at least incorporating low-maintenance elements into the garden – might suit you. Here are a few tips for designing and planting a low-maintenance garden.
Limit the Different Plants
Every different type of plant you add to your garden increases the complexity of care. Different plants need different levels of water, nutrients, and sunlight and thus the wider your variety of plants, the more time and effort it will take to care for them. If you don’t have a large area for your garden, you can create a garden just as peaceful and beautiful using limited plant types as trying to go for too much variety and suffering with the complexity.
Remove Some of the Lawn
The more grass you have, the more effort it’s going to take to maintain it and the more time you’re going to spend pulling up weeds, mowing the grass, and trimming the edges. Think about replacing some of the grass lawn with paving or a deck to not only make the garden more functional but to remove some of the work involved. Plus, you’ll save on water with less grass!
Get an Irrigation System Installed
Speaking of water, adding an automated irrigation system will offer a massive time saving too, and you won’t have to remember to water the plants anymore, which is particularly useful in drier climates, such as if you’re living at a Senior living Scottsdale home. It’s important to plan out your garden for this sort of installation, creating beds and areas where you can save on lengths of pipe and fixtures, which will decrease the complexity of your system, saving you money, and having less that can go wrong.
Top Dressing Saves Effort
In your flower and garden beds is where you’re likely to find most of the weeds and time-consuming work in looking after your garden. Using a good top dressing can limit or even suppress the growth of weeds, which means less time on your hands and knees pulling up those troublesome pesky things. Look at gravel or slate chips, which look great as a top dressing.
Opt for Hardwood
Wood adds so much visually to a garden and creates barriers and edges to beds and pathways, but it’s also susceptible to nature. Softer woods need a lot more maintenance, varnishing, and weather protection than harder woods do, so where possible look for and opt for hard woods for your needs.
With some careful planning and taking on board some of these tips, your garden will offer you a place to relax, unwind, and just enjoy your small piece of nature whenever you want to without having to put a lot of work, time, and effort into maintenance. It’s the perfect balance.
