Not everyone is naturally green-fingered.

You might be working on fixing up the outside of your home but have been discouraged by the time you need to put in to make your garden look good, or are just finding it more difficult than you expected. If this is you, then you need a more low-maintenance garden. If you’re new to gardening, want to freshen up your garden easily, or just don’t have much time to care for a garden, then these tips are for you. 

Keep Plant Variety Down To A Minimum

The fewer plants you have in your garden, the more free time you will have to enjoy the ones you do have. You could even go even further and remove all your plants, and replace them with a gravel garden. If you don’t want to go quite as extreme as this, there are other options. 

You could plant evergreen shrubs such as lavender, or add some colour by bringing in a few plant containers. Just stick to no more than two types of plant in order to keep the work to a minimum. 

Leave Your Lawn Out

Lawns need a lot of attention, so you need to rethink yours if you want a low-maintenance garden. But what can you do to replace something that is seen as so crucial to a garden? 

• Plant native or regional plant varieties around the trees in your lawn. Pick a species that won’t interfere with the roots of the tree, such as spring bulbs like the crocus. 
• Make gravel paths. Paths that are four to eight feet wide will stop weeds from growing and will help excess water to drain faster. Pavers or flagstones work too. 
• Make seating areas near your paths. Lay more gravel for benches and other garden furniture along the path, and make designated zones for compost, trash, tool storage, and seating areas. To keep weeds at bay, use a vinegar product or a flamethrower. 
• Replace what’s left of your lawn with wide plant beds. To keep the beds looking good all year round, choose evergreen and native border shrubs, bulbs, and perennials. 

If you like the way a lawn looks, but don’t want the work, you could try replacing it with artificial grass. Ask artificial grass suppliers to find out whether this would work in your garden. 

Spend Your Time Where It Counts

Low maintenance gardening means getting the most out of your green space with the least amount of effort. To do that, you need to make the time you spend outdoors count. Look at your garden and make a note of the features that you interact with the most.

Whether this is a small vegetable patch or a seating area, focus your efforts on this particular thing that you interact with most, and minimise the maintenance work needed everywhere else. 

You could replace your lawn with paving, swap more challenging plants for shrub borders, and so on. Another trick is to move the most maintenance-heavy plants closer to the door of your home or the shed, so you can cut down how much time you need to spend carrying things around. 

Scratch Weeding Off Your To-Do List

All that time spent uprooting weeds can be saved if you replace some of your perennial beds with shrubs. Shrubs are easy to plant through a weed-suppressing membrane and don’t require regular watering. Then, add a mulch layer on top (bark or gravel work well) and then spend the next season enjoying plants without the need to weed. 

Show Some Love To The Soil In Your Garden

Even inexperienced gardeners know that feeding your plants is important, but many people don’t realize that you can do the same with your soil. You can make your garden more low maintenance by enriching the soil with compost. 

Doing this allows soil tilth to build up which then helps your plants to ‘digest’ their meals more easily. Best of all, you only need to do this once a year to get healthier plants. All you need to do is scatter the mineral supplements under your annual layer of compost, and you’re done. 

Apply Mulch In An Easier Way

Cover all your plant beds with a layer of mulch that is four to six inches deep. Doing this serves two purposes. The mulch will suppress the weeds, but also conserves some of the moisture in the soil underneath. To get the best results, use well-rotted dairy manure and spread it from October to April (only during snowless winters). 

Let Technology Do The Work For You 

No garden can really be all that low maintenance if you’re having to spend lots of time watering plants. Install an automatic sprinkler system to make things easier.

Install the sprinklers in an area where they will benefit as many of your plants as possible, then just let them do the work for you. Just remember to maintain and make repairs to your sprinklers occasionally so you can be sure your plants are getting the water that they need. 

Build Your Garden With Hardscaping In Mind

This tip is just common sense. The more inanimate objects there are in your garden, the less maintenance the garden will require. Think about replacing your lawn with paving, and swap some plants beds for slate paths. 

Remember that not all hardscaping is easy to maintain, especially if it’s labelled as ‘softscaping’. For example, decking needs to be cleaned often, and gravel will need to be raked to keep the surface even. 

Fill Your Kitchen Garden With Perennials

Perennials take some time to blossom, but once they have, they pretty much look after themselves. This makes them ideal for a low maintenance garden. 

By choosing perennials, you can also spend a lot less time researching what kind of soil your garden has, worrying about your local climate, or pruning unruly plants. 

Great low maintenance options for a kitchen garden include:

• Salad burnet
• Sorrel
• Wild rocket
• British gooseberry