If you have a garden in your home, it is probably one of the most important parts of the homestead for you. It is a place where the family can play together, spend time in some nature, and become a handy storage spot. But if you are not the keenest gardener in the world, you might sometimes find yourself feeling a little overwhelmed when it comes to maintaining the garden.
Most gardens do indeed require a great deal of maintenance to keep them intact. But is there such a thing as a maintenance-free garden – and if so, how can you make yours like that? Let’s take a look at how you might go about achieving that.
Scale Back The Lawn
The part of most gardens that tends to require the most care and attention is usually the lawn. After all, grass grows easily and quickly, and you are going to need to keep it mowed or trimmed regularly if you want the garden to avoid looking unruly. If you are sick of always having to do that, you can improve the situation simply by scaling back the lawn a little. So how do you do that?
One of the best ways is to replace part of it with a patio. A patio requires very little or no maintenance, and yet it can be used as a great way to make the garden more enjoyable to be in too. You don’t have to get rid of the entire lawn, but just getting the patios builders in to build you a new patio on the part of the lawn is really going to make a difference here.
You can also set out some flowerbeds where the lawn currently is and fill it with plants that require little care (more on that later). Alternatively, you might replace the lawn with another type of lawn. Rather than grass, you could use Corsica mint – this grows very slowly indeed, smells absolutely amazing, and looks quite similar to short grass.
Box In Your Plants
If you have many plants, you can make it easier to look after them by simply compartmentalising them. In other words, you build boxes around each patch so that the plants don’t end up spreading or becoming too unwieldy. You will find this makes it much easier to care for them, and you can still keep your garden looking amazing with all sorts of flowers of different colours and so on. It’s a simple act to build a basic box, but if you prefer, you can also get a readymade version online to use too. However you manage it, boxing in your plants in different compartments can really make them easier to care for.
Set Up A Drip System
For whatever plants you might have that require regular manual watering, you will want to find a solution that enables you to have it done more or less automatically. That’s because, after lawn care, watering is the next biggest task that faces anyone who is looking after a garden. As it happens, it’s pretty simple to set up an automatic watering system, and the best way is probably to try out a drip system.
You can easily make one of these at home using an old piece of hose that you have cut holes into at various points along the way. Alternatively, if you want it to be more professional, you might want to buy some soaker hoses, which do the hard work for you. The great thing about drip systems is that they water the plants right to the roots, and you don’t have to do anything except ensure the tap is turned on at the right times.
Plant Perennials
In general, you want to plant perennials in your garden more than shorter-span plants, as these last, all year round, take a lot longer to grow, and require much less care on the whole. Many slow-growing perennials can be left alone more or less the whole year, apart from the occasional prune, which you might need to do once or twice a year at most. On the whole, having perennials means that you can design your garden to have whatever colour scheme and aesthetic themes you like, but without attending to plants all the time.
Rock Gardens
The beauty of a rock garden is that it will take no maintenance whatsoever, especially if you fill it out with plants that like to be left alone. Some plants really are like that: think of something like the humble begonia, which wants about a teaspoon of water a month and will grow happily in any conditions. Alternatively, you can grow morning glories: these stunning plants actually prefer to be left alone, and you can get away with never watering them at all if there is just a slight amount of rain where you live. Whichever plants you go for, a rock garden can take up space in an aesthetically pleasing way and without providing you with extra jobs that you have to do to keep it looking great.
Accessible Storage
It would help if you always aimed to have plenty of easily accessible storage in your garden. This can be as simple as a shed or an outhouse if you have such a thing. The important thing is that you can easily get to your tools, as this simple difference makes it so much easier for you to care for your garden when you do need to go out and do some work. Consider this when you are designing a new garden especially – in that way, you will be making things easier for yourself in the long run right from the start of the garden’s life.
There might not be such a thing as a garden with absolutely zero maintenance – but using the tips above, you can at least keep a garden with very little maintenance.
