If you often look at your garden with a look of disdain, then this article has likely found you at the right time. Your garden’s upkeep is certainly of importance, and it can be easily achieved with just a few simple efforts.
When it comes to improving your garden, adopting year-round strategies is much more effective. From mulching to choosing low-maintenance plants, here are a few tips that will help you improve your garden for easy maintenance all year round.
Mulch heavily
Mulch is a good way of protecting your plants and prepping them for the winter, where harsh weather can damage a lot of plants. By applying mulch, you help to reduce the watering and weeding necessary.
Applying around 2-4 inches will suffice, and this mulch can be anything from compost to bark and wood chips. Add these to all of your available beds, and you’ll save yourself a lot of effort when it comes to keeping maintenance tasks low in the garden.
Creating your own compost is easy to do too, and can be bits of food waste and cardboard that’s built up over time. Not only does it help with weeding, but it can also be a great way of enriching your soil, too.
Pick low-maintenance plants
Low-maintenance plants should always be a preferred choice when you're improving your garden for easy maintenance. The last thing you want to do is end up trying to wrestle with plants and shrubs that are more demanding of your time and effort than anticipated.
Opt for hardy and long-lived shrubs that are ideally drought-tolerant. Perennials are also a good choice for longevity, and when it comes to plants, the ones that cover the ground will often require minimal care.
Integrating evergreen plants helps ensure your garden looks good, regardless of the season. It can be hard to stay motivated with your garden when, during certain seasons, some plants don’t look their best. Evergreens are some of the best options, reducing the need for that constant, seasonal cleanup.
Automate watering
If you’re going to do anything that will help minimize the effort you make on your garden, it’s automating your watering. Instead of having to take a watering can to all of your plants, which might take a while to do each time, you should implement a watering system that you can automate.
Being able to automate your watering systems from your phone makes it a lot easier to manage the watering of your entire garden.
From the sprinkler systems on the lawn to the automated watering that operates in every bed that requires hydration. Automating certainly helps to save you a lot of time and effort, making everything that needs to be watered, is done so without fail.
Make use of containers
Instead of picking out smaller pots for your plants, opt for larger pots as they dry out a lot more slowly and, as such, require less frequent watering too.
As well as choosing larger pots, the smaller pots will often make your space look more cluttered. A minimalist approach is often a much more preferred choice.
Reduce lawn size
Your lawn is most likely to be taking up the most time. Having to mow your lawn can be a challenge that many homeowners don’t want to do. Instead, they’ll often let it grow until it becomes so unruly, and then that in itself becomes a lot of hard work to cut down.
With that in mind, you might want to look at reducing your lawn size and replacing it with more manageable features. Adding texture to the space through paving stones for a patio area or gravel to help create a border around the garden are all ways to reduce lawn size.
Adopt chunking
To help break down your maintenance efforts, do so by chunking tasks together. Breaking them down into small, fifteen-minute tasks rather than tackling the whole garden at once is going to be a more productive effort.
If you’re not adopting this method, then you may find yourself burning out, which can then lead to unfinished work in your backyard and much-needed work that might get damaged if you leave it undone for a few days.
Don’t forget about seasonal maintenance checklists. These are a great way of keeping on top of all the efforts that need to be made when it comes to keeping on top of it all.
With these tips, you’ll hopefully be able to improve your garden so that it remains an easy effort all year round.