It’s one thing to have a sensational garden, but if keeping it up to scratch takes all your spare time you can never just sit and enjoy it. It is possible to create a labour-saving garden that looks great throughout the year. The trick is to work out how much time you can spare, and design a garden that gives you the right balance. These easy landscaping ideas make your garden easier to care for by using low maintenance landscaping plants, mulch, drip irrigation, and other easy gardening ideas.
Low-maintenance plants
Low-maintenance plants save you time once they are established, but you need to prepare your soil properly first, and then keep them watered until they start to grow.
Some plants can’t help making work
- Herbaceous perennials need staking, tying up, deadheading, then cutting down at the end of their growing season.
- Roses need annual pruning plus regular feeding and deadheading and some varieties are prone to disease.
- Bedding plants and vegetables need watering in a dry summer, feeding and replanting.
- Some shrubs and climbers need aftercare, so pick your type carefully. You can’t go far wrong with a mixture of shrubs, conifers and grasses if you want to cut your work down.
Ideal low-maintenance plants are the sort that look good over as long a period as possible, but don’t need a lot of fussing over.
Tips for a no time garden
When you first plant a ‘no time’ garden, everything will need watering. And if the weather stays dry, new plants will need watering until they are established. If you don’t want to bother doing it by hand, it pays to lay down a watering system. Porous pipes can be snaked between plants, and if connected to an outdoor tap with a water timer will turn on and off automatically. Cover the bed with a mulch of bark chippings when you have finished which, as well as covering the pipe, will also stop the water from evaporating.
It is possible to create a labour-saving garden that looks great throughout the year. If you find you have more time at a later date it will be easy to add additional plants to the basic design. Select plants that will give the greatest reward, such as those that will flower for a long time or those which provide interest throughout the year.
