Planning out a landscape for your home that is not only beautiful and lush, but also only requires minimum time and money in order to keep in maintained. A low maintenance landscape requires some planning, pick structures, plants, ground coverings and systems that will help reduce your watering, weeding, trimming, and mowing chores.
Consider Your Available Time
Figure out how much time you spend maintaining your yard throughout the year, consider what seasonal chores you have. If you need to mow, plant, prune, weed, water, rake, or shovel snow throughout the year, what chores out of those would you like to change? Maybe you want to cut down on watering and weeding, therefore you should choose foliage that doesn’t require so much upkeep.
List Your Needs
How do you plan to use your yard, do you have lots of barbecuing planned, do you want a vegetable or flower garden, do your kids need play space or are you simply viewing the landscape from the windows of your home? Various activities require different ground surfaces, structures, or plantings.
Assess Your Landscape
Make a map and list of existing features, include any fences, trees and shrubs, buildings and paved surfaces. Note problem areas, such as poor views, noise, lack of privacy, steep slopes or places where plants grow poorly or water accumulates.
Choose Time-Saving Systems & Surfaces
Consider installing some low maintenance alternatives to solve those larger landscape problems. Installing an automatic irrigation system to water the lawn and garden, choose to install a deck or paved patio rather than having grass, eliminating the need to mow the lawn. Fences and vine covered trellis instead of a clipped hedge, group shrubs and trees into mulched beds to reduce mowing, trimming and watering, mulch also helps prevent weeds.
Go for Low Maintenance Plants
Go for plants that fit the space you have, keep in mind small nursery plants will grow. If you want to reduce planting time, plant flowering shrubs or perennials that grow back yearly, rather than annuals that only grow in a specific season. Pick plants that will thrive best in your soil, sun and climate. Plant perennials that die to the ground in autumn rather than shrubs, in places where snow accumulates or slides off the roof. Choose plants with features that look good in more than one season, such as flowers in spring, handsome leaf color in fall and attractive bark in winter.
We hope you found these tips helpful when working on your new low maintenance landscape. For any and all yard waste you need to dispose of, call us at Dumpster Rental Inc for an affordable roll off container for all of your yard waste and debris!
