How to Reduce the Amount of Work in the Garden

Not everyone has sufficient time to look after their gardens and for many either through advancing years or disability caring for the garden can become too physically demanding. Instead of being a recreation the garden becomes a cause of anxiety.

To reduce the amount of work in the garden it’s necessary to identify the three great time wasters, namely weeding, mowing and pruning. The aim should be to drastically reduce all three

Planning and Redesigning for the Low Maintenance Garden

• When planning, or redesigning parts of the garden, following a few basic rules will pay dividends.
• Create an easy care design with flowing shapes avoiding tight, wiggly edges to lawns which are difficult to mow.
• Avoid lots of small beds set in a lawn as these result in too many edges to cut and maintain.
• Narrow grass paths are best avoided, because they wear quickly and much time will be spent repairing worn turf.

Forget the Perfect Lawn

Large intensively managed lawns are not a low-maintenance option. The amount of time and money spent mowing, edging, scarifying and controlling weeds is phenomenal.

• Adopt a less frequent mowing regime for areas away from the house and leave the fertilizer bag alone.
• Consider leaving an area uncut and wild flowers will soon appear.
• Where spring-flowering species predominate then cut the grass from mid-summer.
• To encourage summer flowering species mow in early autumn and rake off the cut vegetation.

Replace Some of the Lawn With Hard Landscape Features

Hard landscaped areas are certainly low maintenance and an integral part of modern gardens which are used extensively for eating out and entertaining. As part of the overall design some of the lawn can be replaced with paving, brickwork or decking. However, avoid at all costs following the environmentally disastrous trend of totally or largely paving over entire gardens. This practise is destroying wildlife habitats, raising temperatures and increasing the dangers of flash flooding.

Consider the Maintenance Needs of Plants

• Reduce the number of bedding plants, hanging baskets and containers in the garden. Caring for them may not be hard work, but it is continuous.
• Selecting the right plant for the right place is vital. The pH of the soil, soil structure, soil texture, climate and aspect must all be taken into account if plants are to flourish.
• Choose shrubs which don’t get too big too quickly and pick those which require virtually no pruning such as Euoymus fortunei, many of the Hebes, dwarf Rhododendrons and Ericas.

Control Weeds the Easy Way

Firstly it is essential to completely eliminate all perennial weeds before doing any planting. Ground covering plants like Epimedium x rubrum when they spread will blot out light and keep down weed populations, but growing plants through a landscape fabric like’ Plantex’ means weed free ground from the start. For aesthetic purposes such materials look better covered with a mulch such as bark.

With Some Effort Easy Care Gardening is Sustainable

The low maintenance garden can be very attractive and is a more sustainable one, but it has to be planned and worked at initially in order to spend less time mowing, weeding and pruning.