Low-maintenance landscaping tips

Low Maintenance Landscaping

Low-maintenance landscape designs have many different meanings, ideas, and visions when you ask people about it or when you read or watch videos on this topic. Ultimately, it comes down to what you want to see when you come home from work, look out your windows, or be surrounded by when you sit outside relaxing, and how much maintenance you want to do to keep it looking great.

The following are past experiences and tips learned to design for lower maintenance

inside 90 degree corner

landscaping.

Some Facts:

• Low-maintenance design doesn’t mean you can’t have a theme or style added to the design.

• Low maintenance can fit all budgets.

• Your property won’t look plain or like a boring shopping plaza.

• You can use many of the same plants as before; there are many varieties now that have a slower growth rate, smaller mature sizes, and are less likely to reseed themselves, reducing your need for maintenance.

• You need irrigation for low-maintenance landscaping, this is a personal choice to have an in-ground system, deal with hoses and sprinklers when needed, or you design with only having your property watered by rainfall none of them are mandatory.

• There are no zero-maintenance landscape designs, but with the right planning, plant selection, and layout, you can reduce maintenance tasks and make the tasks you still have to do easier.

Let's talk about some situations and ideas to get closer to low maintenance.

Low-Maintenance Landscaping Tips and Mistakes:

Lawns:

• 

  uncut grass in this tight corner

  Make mowing easy by avoiding hard-to-reach areas that require more string trimming. When designing, consider the size and type of lawnmower you have or plan to get. Avoid making inside 90-degree corners; instead, make curves for your lawnmower to easily follow. Use the width of your lawnmower so you don’t create areas too narrow, requiring a trimmer or another mower. Also, avoid having areas where you have to go backward with your mower, as it takes more time and effort and increases the risk of backing into something.

  

  a gentle garden bed curve eliminates extra trimming

Mowing Steep Slopes:

• Creating tiered garden beds on slopes is expensive. There are many different ideas, plants, and products to make planting on slopes easier, instead of just making them grass that you have to cut. With the right design, you may only need to care for the slope once a year. Depending on the shape of your property, re-grading could be an option to make slopes easier to mow.

Low or Poorly Draining Lawn Areas:

• Install drainage to help dry the area or move the water to a Rain Garden to be managed. Rain Gardens can look like other garden beds, just with the ability to collect and drain rainwater in a certain location while the rest of your yard is dry and usable. Re-grading your yard can be an option but doesn’t always solve drainage problems, depending on the situation.

Overcrowding Plants in Garden Beds:

• 

  crowded garden beds are hard to maintain

  Can you easily get into the garden to trim, pull weeds, or blow leaves out? Making a garden look full can easily become too full and overgrown. With good spacing and layout, you can have the look of a full garden without overcrowding. Besides trimming and pruning to control the size of shrubs, use growth regulator foliage spray, which slows the growth of shrubs without extra trimming. Another choice, which I prefer, is to plant slow-growing and smaller mature size varieties. If you find plants that have both, that’s low-maintenance gold.

Avoid Planting Large Shrubs Along Edges:

• Avoid planting shrubs that will grow large along driveways, walkways, around patios, or near the edge of lawns. These will give a fuller-looking garden bed, but without constant trimming, they will encroach into these areas. Instead, use flowers or low-growth height plants along the edges, followed by a row of bigger shrubs further away from these edges. This gives the garden a fuller look without encroaching or constant trimming.

Privacy Screening:

• Privacy screening usually consists of trees from the conifer family like pine, hemlock, spruce, juniper families, including the popular arborvitaes. All of these will, over time, need a lot of space to grow into your desired screen. There are trees and shrubs that grow into “vase” shapes naturally, so if you already have a fence, these will grow higher than a fence and provide privacy and some shade. If you don’t have a fence, smaller plants and shrubs can be layered in front to gain privacy from the ground up to the foliage of the “vase” shaped trees or shrubs, which will provide privacy at higher heights. Depending on what species of “vase-shaped” tree or shrub is planted, they can reach several feet high or higher.

Yard Access:

• Besides making your yard easy to use with one lawnmower to cut grass, why not make it easy to get through with a wheelbarrow, moving outdoor furniture, or having a contractor work on your house or property? Have a gate that is at least three feet (36 inches) wide for most “mini” equipment, or have a section of the fence you can easily remove. For example, I worked at one house that looked like it had a narrow gate, but the post with the visible gate latch had a second gate latch on the backside to open another hinged section of the fence. Then you could lift the post with the latches out of a square metal post hole and out of the way. From a distance, it looked like a single wide gate.

Native Plants:

• I always recommend native plants for easy growing and great blooms, but it doesn’t mean all native plants will grow well. Knowing your soil health/condition will let you know what you can plant. Soil health/condition can limit your choices when creating your landscaping. Having the soil tested to know pH levels, mineral levels, and soil type lets you know what steps you need to take. These steps can include amending the soil to grow a wider variety of plants, knowing which plants will grow well in your soil, or finding plants that can help improve the health of your soil, eventually letting you have a wider choice of plants. If you decide to bring in soil to either fill in or build up your yard and you are digging and planting into the new delivered soil, it should be tested as well. There are common plants that can grow easily in most soil situations.

Bark Mulch or Decorative Stone/Gravel:

• I can only provide you with what I’ve experienced over the years, but it all comes down to what you like and want to see every day and makes you happy and relaxed. A few quick facts about mulch or stone in gardens:

  1. Mulch has to be spread more often than stone, which is spread once and then just maintained after.

  2. Mulch decomposes and adds nutrients to the soil. Stone doesn’t decompose or add nutrients, normally.

  3. Stone is less likely to attract insects or cause mold or fungus.

  4. The upfront cost of mulch is lower, but over the years the cost adds up.

  5. Both will develop weeds that need to be pulled or treated.

  6. Mulch doesn’t need weed fabric since it decomposes into soil. Stone does need weed fabric to prevent it from settling into the soil.

Watering:

• Depending on the plants you use, i.e., sun and heat-loving, cool and shade-loving plants are placed correctly and are established, this should reduce the need to water unless a long heat wave and/or drought is happening. If you have potted plants, they would need to be watered frequently unless you have a self-watering pot or a drip irrigation system going into the pot. Lawn areas will go dormant in the heat and drought; sometimes it will come back, but not guaranteed. (Check the lawn section for more).

  
  

• You can still have an irrigation system put in and have the ability to set watering schedules or water just certain sections that need it by computer or phone, avoiding moving hoses and sprinklers around the yard. These systems do require service at the start and end of each season.

Hardscaping:

• Natural, man-made pavers, gravel, or concrete used to make walkways leading through your yard to your front door, sitting area, or patio require less maintenance than gardens and grass and add extra space to your home.

Lawns:

• Some say they are labor-intensive, but they do require less labor than gardens since you just mow it, trim it, and handle the leaves in the fall as the basic needs. If you want the deep green and striped lawn, you do need to put in time to get it looking good and stay looking good. Basic lawns don’t need fertilizer, regular watering, or fancy mowing equipment (thatchers, aerators, etc.); deep green lawns will need all of these. Developing strong and deep root systems for your lawn will reduce the need for all the extra care. Low maintenance landscape designs has many different meanings, ideas, and visions when you ask people about it or when you read or watch videos about this topic. What it comes down to is what you want to see when you come home from work, look out your windows, or be surrounding by when you sit outside, and how much maintenance do you want to do to keep it looking great.