An Introduction To Low-Maintenance Gardening

Designing, creating and maintaining a beautiful garden can be a time-consuming business, but it doesn't have to be. Many components of the garden design can be adapted to make future maintenance a great deal easier.

Your garden should give you pleasure and should be places to enjoy and relax in. If yours takes up so much of your time in routine maintenance that you have little time left to really appreciate it, maybe you need to think about how to reduce the labour time, without losing its natural beauty.

What Is Low Maintenance Gardening?
Low Maintenance does not just mean cutting down on the number of plants that you grow. The choice of specimens and how you use them is more important as many plants require hardly any attention from year to the next. You can also greatly reduce your workload with imaginative design and landscaping.

What are the Benefits?
A modestly sized, low-maintenance garden may require only half and hour a week to keep it looking good. But a truly, low-maintenance garden, in which many labour-intensive components such as the lawn or difficult plants have been dispensed with, could require so little work that even if you took several weeks vacation, it would have little effect on the appearance.

Assess Your Garden
Firstly You need to assess which jobs you enjoy and which you would rather do without, then start by modifying your garden in the order of your priorities and how much time you want to save.

If you enjoy propagating but really hate weeding, for example, you need to fins a way to eliminate the weeds permanently, and if you don't like mowing the lawn you can look at installing other surfaces, which require less maintenance.

You need to take into account the current style of your house and the existing shape and design of the garden itself to ensure that any new feature will fit in and not look too much out of place.

For any new plants you buy you will need to check that they will grow happily in the soil type and position in your garden. Some low-maintenance plants such as heathers and conifers have distinct soil preferences that you will need to consider.

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