Looking for ways to improve your family garden while ensuring it remains low maintenance? In this guide, we’ll discuss big-impact idea for low-maintenance family gardens and how they can be implemented. Let’s dive in!
Large Plant Pots
If you’re a fan of making your garden colourful and organic, consider opting for large plant pots due to their low maintenance requirements. Naturally, these will need less watering (in most cases) than small pots. This makes a lot of sense in small gardens with minimal or no garden soil.
Long-lasting Plant Life
Also, on the topic of plants, choosing plants that will last longer is a good idea if you want to minimize the level of maintenance needed for your family garden. Also, opting for evergreen combinations can minimize the need to clean up fallen leaves, branches etc. during the winter.
Simplifying Cutting the Lawn
Fitting a permanent edge to your lawn (e.g., paving stones or a run of bricks) can make cutting the grass easier. By not having to spend time trimming the edges each time you cut the grass, you can lower maintenance as a result.
Beyond that, you may want to think about allowing your lawn to grow longer. For example, depending on the size of your back garden, it’s worth considering keeping a small area of short grass in a certain area of your garden while letting the grass grow further elsewhere.
It’s worth trying different grass cutting frequencies for different areas of your garden. Find the right balance between a well-trimmed focal area of your family garden and those that you wish to let grow wilder. The exact way you’ll want to go about this (if at all) will depend on your preferences and what works best from a practical, safety, and aesthetics point of view.
Raised Garden Beds
Raised garden beds offer a range of benefits including fewer weeds and improved water retention for areas with super-sandy soil.
Moreover, replaced ground level beds and borders with raised beds will make various relevant garden aspects easier, including:
- Planting
- Growing
- Weeding
- Watering
Weatherproof Furniture
While you’ll likely think of garden furniture as something you must put away at the end of the day, there’s always the option of investing in weatherproof furniture.
No Need to Collect Clippings
Letting clippings drop onto the grass will leave you with less work overall. Clippings can return nutrients to the grass and help with lawn growth meaning that it will need feeding less frequently.
Simplicity When It Comes to Plants
By keeping what plants, you grow in your garden relatively simple, you can also lower the need for maintenance in your family garden.
For example, consider planting evergreen plants and hardy shrubs. These sorts of plants require less maintenance than most. Moreover, you’ll want to consider groundcover plants since they can minimize the emergence of weeds and offer a certain level of sturdiness.
Mulching
Mulch is material (usually organic) that can be added to the soil’s surface in a garden. It will be at least 5cm thick and should be applied between the end of autumn and late winter (i.e., November to February). But what is the purpose of mulching and how can it lower garden maintenance?
Among the benefits of mulching include:
- Improving your soil’s fertility and health
- Lowering the growth of weed
- Offering frost protection
- Enhancing the aesthetics of that specific region of your garden
- Soil moisture conservation
Mulch may consist of chipped bark, gravel, slate chippings, garden compost that is well-rotted and manure. Mulch may be used to cover up bare soil between plants. All in all, mulch can make it much easier to maintain your garden.
Using a Pond in a Smart Way
Water features are popular with households throughout the UK as they can add a nice, natural touch to a garden space. However, one way of reducing the maintenance of water features is by avoiding including fish in a pond.
Without fish in your ponds, you won’t need to worry about filters or/and pumps in the same way.
Fish-free ponds are also less likely to experience issues with blanket weed or algae. You may even want to consider converting your pond into a bog garden (i.e., allowing plant life to grow out from the pond). This can create a wilder look. If you fancy this idea, it will lower your need to maintain your pond. It’s also best to avoid using super shallow water features since these will dry out fast and require topping up often.
Install Composite Decking
Replacing some of the grass/turf in your garden with composite decking is one way to lower maintenance requirements.
There are a wide range of decking options available, and costs differ widely too. For example, even with composite decking prices alone, budget options have a supply cost of £10 to £25 per board while deluxe WPC boards cost around £70 to £100 per board.
Composite decking is particularly low maintenance. Generally made with wood fibre and plastic binding ingredients, the strong boards used for the decks require minimal treatment (if any) including when installed and after installation.
Consider Billowing Borders
To keep weeding and pest control down, you may want to consider billowing borders. But what does this mean exactly?
By billowing borders, we mean letting plant life naturally grow tall, large and wild at the borders of your garden. This approach is naturally low maintenance since you’re allowing the borders to grow out and keeping it “short and clean” isn’t your objective. Of course, this touches on a debate as to whether letting a garden grow wild and natural is a good look but really, it’s simply a matter of personal preference.
To achieve beautiful billowing borders, you may want to consider the following:
- Grasses
- Hardy meadow blooms
- Perennials *
*You’ll specifically want to use perennials that are easy to maintain (e.g., achillea and echinacea).
