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| Image Credit: Unsplash |
This is a collaborative post
If you have a large garden, you’ll be aware of just how much time it takes to keep it looking good. It can easily eat into evenings and weekends, reducing the amount of time you have to spend with your family and friends. So, anything you can do to reduce the burden is a big plus. Thankfully, it’s easier than you might imagine to save time and effort on your garden maintenance. Here are nine tips to get you started.
1. Keep your shed tidy and organised
A quick gardening job can quickly take up half a day if you
have to search for and clean up tools and equipment before you can make a
start. So, get your shed tidied up and organised to save yourself some time. A
wall of hooks will ensure tools are neatly arranged and shelves lined with
labelled boxes will make smaller items easy to find.
2. Do small tasks each week to stop the jobs piling up
It can be very time-consuming to tackle all the big
gardening jobs at once – you’re likely to need a whole weekend to get things
ship-shape. A better way to maintain your garden might be to do small jobs on a
regular basis. So, you only need half an hour here or an hour there.
This makes it much easier to fit in your gardening around
your other commitments. And the more frequently you do the weeding, the less
digging you’ll need to do.
3. Choose easy-care plants
Some plants need more TLC than others, so what you plant can
greatly affect the amount of garden maintenance you need to do. For instance,
some flowers need deadheading regularly to keep them blooming while others
naturally drop their spent flowers or develop pretty seedheads, so you can
simply leave them alone. With shrubs and climbers, it’s worth checking what
pruning group they’re in before you buy them. Some plants require hard or seasonal
pruning to keep them healthy whilst others need very little attention.
4. Get rid of the lawn
Lawns can need a lot of attention during the growing season.
Along with mowing, they typically need feeding, weeding and watering as well as
scarifying and aerating. So, you might want to consider the radical step of
getting rid of your lawn. Replacing it with prairie or gravel-style planting
can make it much easier to manage a large area of garden. This is especially
true if your garden suffers from summer droughts.
5. Cover garden furniture when it’s not in use
It’s not just the greenery that takes time to maintain. Your garden furniture can also need a lot of care and attention. Patio sets regularly need wiping over and drying off before you can pop the cushions out. You could avoid this hassle by using garden covers. This can also help to protect your furniture over winter, so there’s less seasonal maintenance to do.
6. Hire a gardener to do the big jobs
If you really don’t enjoy gardening and you’re finding that
it’s eating up way too much of your free time, then let someone else do it.
There’s little point torturing yourself when an experienced gardener can do it
all for you. They’re also likely to do a better job, so you could end up with a
nicer space to enjoy with your family.
7. Set up a soaker hose
During the summer, gardens often need watering twice a day.
So, this one job alone can seriously sap your spare time. Setting up an
automated irrigation system will not only save you time and effort but it can
also reduce the amount of water you use. Sprinklers are great for covering
large areas such as the lawn but a soaker hose is one of the most efficient
ways to water your beds and borders.
8. Grow in pots
Growing plants in pots and containers rather than in the
ground is a good way to reduce garden maintenance. Weeds find it much harder to
spread between pots and they don’t have the space to grow really big, so it’s
easier to keep your outside space tidy. Plus, pots are easy to move into
greenhouses and conservatories over winter, so you don’t need to dig up or wrap
up your tender plants to protect them.
9. Block weed growth
Weeding can take up a lot of time – especially in the spring
and summer when growth is more vigorous. Thankfully, there are a few ways to
keep them down. Newspaper can be layered over beds and borders and topped with
mulch. This blocks the sunlight from weeds, so they can’t grow and helps to
keep the soil moist at the same time. Over larger areas, you could use
horticulture fabric to do the same job.
