Gardening is great until you realise you’ve spent half your weekend weeding, pruning, and generally fighting to keep it all under control without too much to show for the effort. If you’d actually rather be enjoying your garden instead of working on it, then you’re going to need a more low-maintenance approach – otherwise it’ll be all work and no play. 

The good news is that you don’t have to sacrifice a gorgeous garden just to make things easier for yourself, and a low-maintenance garden can still be lush, colourful, and inviting – we promise. So with that in mind, keep reading for some simple tips for a low-maintenance garden. 

Choose Plants That Want To Be There

Not all plants thrive in every environment, and trying to force high-maintenance varieties into your garden isn’t going to work – not unless you’re willing to put a lot of hours into keeping them all alive and looking good. So the trick is to choose plants that basically take care of themselves, otherwise known as native plants. 

Native plants, which could include hardy perennials and drought-resistant types are ideal because they’re used to the soil and weather conditions in your area, and they’ll thrive on them. That means they’ve adapted to the conditions, and you’ll end up with some lovely results all without the need for constant watering, feeding, or protection from the elements. So although you’ll need to do a bit of research, it’s worth it to ensure you don’t have to do any more (or at least not much more) work once everything’s planted and growing. 

Keep Leaves In Check

Autumn is beautiful, but the leaves that start piling up all over your garden aren’t so great. The fact is that raking them up is a never-ending task, especially if there are a lot of trees around, but leaving them isn’t wise either because they’ll essentially suffocate your lawn and flowerbeds. So what can you do? 

The answer is a good leaf blower. If you’re using a leaf blower, instead of spending hours gathering leaves up by hand, you’ll get the job done in minutes, and you’ll be able to clear patios, paths, your lawn, and anything else you want quickly and easily. This is one of those tools you don’t realise you need until you’ve got one, and then you probably wouldn’t ever want to be without it again. 

Do Watering The Right Way

Water can, perhaps surprisingly, be one of the most time-consuming parts of garden maintenance, especially in the summer, so how about making it easier on yourself and saving time and effort in the process? What we’re saying is that instead of constantly having to drag a hose around the garden, you could set up a smart irrigation system instead. 

Look into drip irrigation or soaker hoses, and you’ll get the idea right away – and you’ll see how much easier it could make your gardening life. What happens is that these types of watering systems deliver water directly to the roots of the plants (or grass), and that makes it a lot more efficient, and it saves you a lot of time. And if you want an even easier solution, what about collecting rainwater in a water butt? Not only is that an incredibly eco-friendly thing to do, but it also ensures you’ve got a free water source for your plants (remember, it’s not drinking water unless you’ve got a filter system in place) whenever you need it. 

Use Plenty Of Hardscaping

Here’s a piece of information for you that makes a lot of sense, might even be quite obvious, but that you may not have thought about before – the fact is that the less soil you’ve got exposed in your garden, the less maintenance your garden is going to need. And one way to ensure you’ve got less soil is to use materials like stone, decking, and paving to reduce the areas where weeds can grow and to create a stylish look for your garden. That’s what’s referred to as hardscaping. 

A good patio or path or perhaps some decking doesn’t just add some lovely sense of character to your garden and outside space, but since it also means you’ll have fewer plants to take care of and fewer weeds to deal with, it’s probably going to appeal to anyone who wants a low-maintenance garden. And if you do want to add a bit of colour, using pots filled with easy-to-care for plants or perhaps even herbs are ideal – they can sit on your hardscaping and not cause any problems at all. 

Rethink Your Lawn

Lawns look great… in theory. But in practice, they can be very high maintenance and a bit of a pain to have to deal with. You’ve got to mow them, water them, feed them… it’s a never-ending cycle unless you want dead grass or grass that’s far too long and looks messy (if you don’t do anything to it at all, you’ll definitely get one of those two things). 

So what about swapping out your lawn for an alternative? One thing that might spring to mind if artificial grass, and that can be an ideal solution – you don’t need to do anything do it other than sweep it when it gets dirty (yes, that’s really something you’ll need to do), and your leaf blower we mentioned earlier could come in handy there. Or how about gravel? Or low-ground cover plants like creeping thyme or clover, for example? If you pick something like that, you’ll still have a nice, green garden, but there won’t be any maintenance to do. And if you really love the idea of having a lawn, you could opt for slow-growing grass varieties so you don’t have to mow it so often. 

Final Thoughts

A garden is meant to be a place to relax, not somewhere to get stressed out, and by following the ideas we’ve given you above, you should be able to create the ideal low-maintenance garden to enjoy all year round.