Tips for Low Maintenance Landscaping

Whether you’re a new homeowner or have lived in your home for a number of years, a beautifully landscaped yard is certainly high on your homeowner wish list. Beautiful landscaping not only helps increase your home value, it improves and enhances the look and feel of your entire neighborhood. However, a well landscaped yard does take a considerable amount of time and effort to maintain.

Well, here is some good news. With a well thought-out plan you can still have a beautifully landscaped yard and reduce the amount of time and effort it takes to maintain it.

In this article we’ll share some tips and advice on how to choose the best low maintenance outdoors plants for your landscaping. These low maintenance front yard plants will help you spend more time enjoying and less time maintaining your beautiful yard.

Make a Plan for Your Landscape Design

Starting with a well-thought-out plan is a great way to ensure you have beautiful landscape that doesn’t take all your free time to maintain. First, sketch out the approximate size and shape of the area you want to landscape and choose the focal point. An elegant statue, sculpture or maybe even a water feature, are great centerpieces to build around. Or you could go with a more traditional route and use decorative bushes, a tree, or flowers as your focal point.

Whatever you decide it’s important to note if the areas get full sun, partial sun, or full shade. This information will be useful when it comes to selecting the right low maintenance plants for your landscaping. If you’re unsure of what you want, how to start or just need some advice, reach out to your local landscaping professional for help. They have the knowledge and experience to make recommendations that will work best for your situation. They can also help ensure your landscaping is setup with the right irrigation system so plants, shrubs, trees and flowers stay healthy.

Enrich Your Soil

In order for young plants, flowers and other landscaping to grow they need proper nutrition. All your plants will do much better if you enrich the soil with compost. Compost allows the soil tilth to build up, which helps your plants digest essential nutrients more easily. What’s even better is you only need to do this step once a year. Just add the mineral supplements under the annual compost layer and it will last throughout the year.

Keep Your Plants Simple

It can be very tempting to try and include a wide variety of plants in your landscape design, but it’s much easier to maintain a limited, well-thought out selection. If the goal is to have a beautifully landscaped yard that doesn’t require all your free time to maintain, then choosing 2-4 low maintenance plants, like the ones listed below, will help achieve this goal. These plants look great and require a lot less maintenance.

Your local landscaper can also recommend some great native plants to use. Since they are part of the local flora, native plants tend to be low maintenance because they need less fertilizer, water, pesticides, and overall care to thrive. These plants are conditioned to withstand variations in the local weather and typically do very well. Choosing plants based solely on appearance can be time consuming to maintain, expensive and aggravating when they don’t survive. Some plants will start out looking spectacular when you first plant them, but often don’t survive local weather conditions or where they were planted (in an arear with too much sun or shade).

Eliminate Weeds with Mulch

Another important step to minimizing the amount of time and effort you spend on your landscaping is weed control. Covering all your beds with a layer of mulch approximately 3 to 4 inches deep will save you a lot of time and effort later on. Yes, you’ll have to invest some time and effort initially, but your early efforts will be rewarded later when you don’t have to pull weed as often. Organic mulch, like leaves and wood chips, will help suppress weed growth and conserve moisture in the soil. This combined benefit should help your landscaping thrive, while also proving a neat, clean appearance for your beds.

Consider Professional Landscaping Services from The Grounds Guys

Beautiful landscaping can really distinguish your home as a showplace in the neighborhood. However, keeping all of your landscaping looking beautiful throughout the year can be a time consuming job. If want landscaping that’s the envy of the neighborhood but don’t have the time to do it yourself, or you’re not sure where and how to start, call your local landscaping pros at The Grounds Guys. We offer professional landscape design and installation, as well as routine lawn maintenance services so your yard looks great all year long.

Put your yard in good hands and request an estimate from The Grounds Guys today!