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Low Maintenance Landscaping Ideas
Your yard can look beautiful, regardless of the shape or size that it is. The only problem is that landscaping can take up a lot of your free leisure time, and in a world where that leisure time is reducing due to the number of commitments we all have, sometimes you just need ideas that aren’t going to take your whole weekend.
Here at Best of Tools, we have gathered a few ideas for you on how to make your yard look beautiful without it taking weeks of designing and a lot of cash.
Plants
Using plants that are low maintenance is the first step to an overall low maintenance yard; if you use plants that need regular care and upkeep, you are immediately going to increase the amount of time you will need to spend outdoors on your yard. One way to achieve this is to use potted plants, you can incorporate the pots, shapes, and sizes into the initial design of your yard.
It will be easy to identify if the plants are becoming too big for the containers you are using and therefore need some pruning to bring them back under control. We always recommend using indigenous plants when looking for a low maintenance design, as you will need to do less with them as the native climate will nurture what you have planted.
Combining a variety of plant sizes and colors will also highlight the space they are in, improving the visual aspects of your yard, to the envy of passersby without the area becoming cluttered. You could plant seeds that flower at different times of the year throughout the yard to draw the eye to certain places at certain times. You may want to highlight a beautiful flowering plant in spring or autumn when the trees are not at their full glory.
Lighting
Lighting can play a key part in your yard if you use the lights in the right places to highlight the best features of your property, putting a nice light next to an early spring plant or flower arrangement will show it off beautifully in those darker months. Garden lights are also very accessible with a variety of shapes, designs, brightness, and colors, and if you are looking for an environmentally friendly option, we urge you to check out the widely available solar lights, which add a nice touch in the summer months.
Outdoor lights are also lovely if you have to create an outdoor seating area as you can relax in the early evening with a nice book or good company in your yard without this taking too much time to set up. We do advise that you ensure you have adequate storage or protection for lights and seating during those colder winter months to ensure that you do not need to replace furniture too soon due to rotten wood or rusty metal.
Things to Do
It is nice to have something to do or something to look at while relaxing in your yard, whether this is the seating area we have already mentioned or a nice calming water feature, you can be guaranteed a soothing experience. Natural water features are a great way to add a little zen to your yard, the calming sound of trickling water is a great way to unwind on a summer evening.
We recommend that you don’t overcrowd a water feature though or it can become a bit of an eyesore, we would advise using no more than three components to create this and ensure you don’t use too many materials and overcrowd the space.
To protect your lawn, we recommend connecting the areas you enjoy spending time in with a walkway, a nice shingle pathway (or a material that suits the members of your home) is a lovely way to move around your yard without constantly wearing down the lawn and needing to reseed to cover the damage.
An alternative to this would, of course, be to use artificial grass, which would mean less time mowing the lawn and less maintenance to complete to ensure your lawn is protected and good to look at all year round. It is also a great way to ensure that your yard is safe for both children and pets.
Highlighting
You can use different materials to highlight certain areas of your yard, for example, using shingle or stone for flower beds is a lovely way to add another dimension to your yard, one which you will not need to water or replace. You could also add some natural wood borders to soil beds to help reduce the amount of spillage into other areas, in turn reducing the amount of time you will be required to spend tidying things up.
Conclusion
There are lots of ways to minimize the amount of time you spend maintaining your yard, and therefore increasing the amount of time spent enjoying it. We recommend, though, that whichever options you choose you to need to keep them consistent throughout your yard to avoid it becoming disjointed and failing visually.
