When you’re proud of your garden, you’ve probably put all of your blood, sweat, and tears into creating a beautiful outdoor space.
You drew up the landscape design yourself, spent hours digging out trenching and edges, and always make sure the lawn is as green as can be.
You knocked the planter beds together yourself, strung up lighting as strategically as possible for maximum illumination, and every week you head out there to prune away the dead weight. You might have even set up a pool, hot tub, or spa to enjoy in the great outdoors.
All in all, you’ve put a lot of hard work into your garden! And if you’re honest with yourself, you’re starting to get a bit sick of it!
But what can you do? Your garden still needs all that time and attention from you. You can’t suddenly stop taking care of it because you’re losing the energy or will for it.
So let’s make it ten times easier to stay energised when it comes to gardening pressures. After all, there are various ways to simplify garden maintenance – although you will need to put a bit of effort into making these changes.
But once you have, your future self won’t have anywhere near as much to do on a constant basis. And if that sounds good to you, here are a few tips for saving time on your garden lawn, beds, and everything in between!
Make Your Lawn Smaller
If the lawn is causing you the biggest headache of all, it’s clear what you need to do first. Make it smaller!
And if you do, you’ll find it a lot easier to stay on top of the upkeep. There’s less grass to mow back, less edging to keep neat, and fewer patches of dry, brown grass to combat in the summer.
You can then use the leftover space for something else, like low maintenance plants, bark or shingle, or simply let it grow over and see what happens.
If you want to, you can also clear out any plants that have already taken root in the space and put down some evergreen shrubbery, or even succulents (if the climate allows), that don’t tend to grow any further than they already have.
That’ll then save on keeping these edging lines as neat as possible over the year.
No matter what you end up doing with it, though, it won’t be anywhere near as problematic as the lawn it used to be!
Mulch on a Regular Basis
Mulching helps to keep moisture in the soil. In times like autumn and winter, when there’s both more rain and drier air to deal with, the mulch prevents both flooding and dehydration.
Mulch also has the superpower of preventing weeds from breaking through the surface, as the top layer is too heavy for them to sprout.
This can kill them off before you even see a hint of them. And if there are plants already grown and competing for space against the weeds, they’ll have a lot more breathing room.
All in all, a good bit of mulch makes weeding more or less a thing of the past.
You can make mulch yourself, or you can use pre-made mulch bought from a garden centre.
The latter is quicker and easier, but the former does make sure you use up the contents of your compost bin.
Use Power Cleaning Tools
A lot of garden maintenance is simply dirt and grime upkeep. You don’t want the yard covered in mildew, nor do you want the back wall of your home to get filthier over time.
So once a month or so, you need to get the bucket and sponge out, set the ladder up, and get to work giving it all a scrub.
Or if you’ve got an outside tap, you’re more than happy to set up the hose for the job.
However, both of these methods can be inefficient, time consuming, and in the case of the hose, waste more water than you realize.
So instead, turn to using power tools for your clean-up duties as well.
An electric power washer can combat grime on both these external surface types – and it’ll do it in half the time with half the amount of water in the tank.
Not only will that make cleaning far less effort for you, but it’s much more sustainable for the environment as well.
Get a Tool Shed
Tool sheds are a necessity for the modern gardener, no matter how few tools you actually make use of.
With a proper tool shed to keep everything in, you have a dry and secure indoor space to put tools that can get blunted, chipped, and broken when they’re just left outside.
And remember, a trowel with a wooden handle can only stand up to so much rain. If it’s always being left out in downpours, it’s going to take on that water and become brittle and moldy.
Tool sheds also give you a dedicated space to work on the smaller garden jobs, such as potting and trimming offcuts.
This means you don’t have to bring that work inside with you, so you don’t have to spend an extra 20 to 30 minutes cleaning up after yourself either.
Save Time on Your Garden Maintenance
When garden maintenance is getting on top of you, it’s key to think long term. Keep it simple and keep it contained.
Downsize your lawn, so there’s both less to mow and so the overgrowing plants don’t look out of place anyway!
Make sure your tools can all be found in one place, and you don’t have to worry about animals gnawing them or rot setting into the handles.
And if you need to have a clean up, make sure you’ve got power tools at hand to blast through the dirt in 5 minutes flat.
With simple changes like these, you’ll have more time to actually enjoy the garden than ever before.