Who doesn’t love a beautifully landscaped backyard? Color and design come together to celebrate the seasons, while offering water management with tree plantings and strategically-placed walls or walkways? There really is something to be said about a landscape that wows at any time of year. The downfall? It often takes significant time and money to keep the lush beauty of your yard and garden in shape year-round.
Depending on your schedule and budget, this can be a detractor to invest in your yard to create that idyllic space. However, there are low-maintenance landscape options that will allow you to have your cake and eat it, too.
Rock your Garden Beds
One of the most obvious time drains in any landscape is plant maintenance. While they
provide beautiful colors and textures to your yard, plants can add to the maintenance needs of your space, but there is a way to mitigate that.
- Indigenous Plants: Fill your garden beds with indigenous plant life that fits your regional temperatures and climate. You’ll need to feed and water them less often if they get what they need from your environment.
- Borders and Garden Walls: Put a decorative garden wall or border around your flower beds to add a sustainable and beautifully practical way to keep your soil and mulch where it should be.
- Stone Ground Cover: While mulch and ground cover plants can be “natural” and even pretty additions to your garden, a low-maintenance landscape needs a little less effort. Use colorful or monochromatic garden stones to fill in between your plants. They last forever, require little to no maintenance and help your flora to stand out.
A few more tips that help keep your garden beds an easier-to-maintain space in your landscape is to decrease the plant population sticking with hearty and space-filing varieties to reduce replacement needs, space shrubs and evergreens throughout your garden beds to decrease the need to water as often, and be sure your plant selections offer varied bloom times to allow for consistent blooming everywhere in your landscape all year long.
Build a Path to Easier Garden Maintenance
What takes the most time to maintain in most landscapes? The lawn. During the height
of spring and summer, and even early fall depending on your geography, cutting the grass can encompass hours of time and gas money just to keep it tolerably short. Cut down on your cutting time and break up your landscape with a walkway. It will decrease the overall grass space and if built with a sustainable, low-maintenance landscape in mind, it will save you money and time in the long run.
Permeable pavers offer a sustainable, durable and maintenance-friendly option for a walkway in your yard. They are designed to allow water from rain or other precipitation to flow through the joints between the pavers into the ground, reducing your need to water and storm water runoff and ice as well. Border your walkway to maintain clean edges and offer a definitive separation from the grass, trees and plants that make up the rest of your landscape.
A sustainable landscape will save you time and money over its lifetime and offer beauty all year round. Make these updates to your yard this fall to simplify your life next spring.