10 steps to an easy-care, low-maintenance garden

Since I just moved to a new house this past fall and pretty much have a blank slate for a brand-new garden (here’s a pic of my daughter and me scratching some spinach into the ground while impatiently waiting for warm weather to return), I’ve decided to take a pro-active approach to easy-care gardening. Believe me, I love the meditative therapy of deadheading and weeding as much as any diehard gardener, but as the mom of a preschooler who works part-time from home, I don’t have the time to also babysit my plants.

So I did some research on how to design, plant, water, choose plantings – and more – to make sure my landscape can start and stay low-maintenance.

Here are some of the great tips I found on how to establish an easy-care garden – or at least make your existing garden work – and look – much better.

Choose easy-care plants

Go heavy on the trees and shrubs, which typically only require a yearly pruning at the most, suggests a great article entitled “Plants for Low, Medium and High Maintenance” on the Sustainable and Urban Gardening blog. Other easy-care plants recommended by the article include ornamental grasses, which only need a cutting back to 6 inches in early spring;  groundcovers (by themselves or around big plants like trees and shrubs) and bulbs that "perennialize" or "naturalize" (spread on their own and come back for years) like crocus, chinodoxa, hyacinths and certain kinds of daffodils.

C. Colston Burrell, in his HowStuffWorks.com article entitled “How to Grow a Low-Maintenance Garden,” suggests dwarf and slow-growing plants that eliminate the need for pruning and pinching. His other tips:

• Avoid tall flowers or veggies that might need staking, caging or other supports.
• Look for compact, self-supporting sizes of tall flowers like delphiniums, asters, daylilies and Shasta daisies.
• Avoid fast-spreading and aggressive perennials such as yarrow, plume poppy, Artemisia ‘Silver King’ and bee balm.
• Plant easy-care, disease-resistant varieties of your favorite plants.

Mulch, mulch, mulch

“Mulch is one of the unsung heroes of low-maintenance landscaping,” says About.com Landscaping Guide David Beaulieu in his article “Tips for Low-Maintenance Landscaping.”

 “An application of mulch can reduce your watering needs significantly,” he notes. “Mulch also suppresses weeds, making yard care much easier.”

Pursue “weedless gardening”

In his widely-acclaimed book Weedless Gardening, Lee Reich suggests reducing the need for weeding in your garden by:

• Minimizing soil disturbance (that is, no unnecessary tilling or turning over of the soil, thus exposing weed seeds to the light and air they need to germinate). You can do this by designating permanent areas for planting and for traffic.
• Keep the soil covered. “Not all weeds come from below. Some hitchhike in by wind or bird,” says Reich. A thin, annual mulch of some weed-free, organic material snuffs out young seedlings, he says. His hungry veggie garden gets an annual, 1-inch deep mulch of compost, his paths get wood chips and his flowerbeds get shredded or decomposed leaves.
• Where regular watering is needed, use drip irrigation.

Know Your Plants

“Buy only the plants that have labels, then keep those labels somewhere you can actually find them — even a large envelope will suffice,” says Sustainable and Urban Gardening blog editor Susan Harris in her article “How to Garden the Low-Maintenance Way.”  Harris keeps her labels in a three-ring binder garden book with one page for each plant. “In addition to taping the grower’s label to the page, I include such details as where the plant came from, the date of purchase, what it cost, and everything I know about the care it needs.”

Water wisely

Invest in soaker hoses – or for more money – an automatic drip irrigation system, says Beaulieu, and put the system on a timer. “Automatic irrigation systems, incidentally, can end up saving you money in the long run,” says Beaulieu. He also suggests grouping your plants by their watering needs.

Click here for Beaulieu’s FAQs on automatic irrigation systems.

Use smart design

Here are some more great ideas from Harris’ article (above):

• Plant in masses (for large plants, 5 to10; for smaller ones, 10 to 30). “This limited plant palette makes it easier to keep up with their care and prevent their intrusion on neighboring plants,” she explains. “Also, the fewer the species, the easier it is to limit yourself to those that are well suited to your site. And aesthetically, massing of plants usually results in a better looking garden, one that’s restful to the eye, not chaotic.”
• Limit freestanding islands, continues Harris, and try to incorporate trees and shrubs into borders in ways that mimic nature — tallest trees in the back, smaller trees and shrubs in front of that, then shorter plants in front of that and then groundcovers in front of that.
• Use large curving lines that are easy to mow along. Edge the lawn with a paved mowing strip flush with the lawn to eliminate the need to trim after mowing. Try to incorporate shrubs and trees into borders.
• Limit high-maintenance plants to one area that’s easily reachable by you and your water supply.
• Include stepping stones or pavers through wide borders, for easy access without causing soil compaction. High-traffic paths should be pavers or stepping stones, set flush with the ground, never lawn.
• Containers are popular in the gardening media but qualify as high-maintenance by any account, especially in the sun where they dry out quickly. “We’re talking daily watering.” Plants in containers also require more frequent feeding.
• One or two high-impact plants in prominent sites can dramatize an otherwise simple garden using a very limited palette of plants.
• “Avoid ponds like the plague,” she says. “Go ahead and try an easy plug-in water fountain, but ponds are a lot of work and don’t believe any pond salesman who tells you they’re not.”

Shrink your lawn

 “Turf grass is a problem, because it’s a water-guzzler,” says Beaulieu in his article (above). So he recommends trying to enlarge or extend hardscapes like walkways and patios. You can also replace a patch of lawn with groundcover, easy-care shrubs and mulch.

Grow a water-wise landscape

Consider xeriscaping (or landscaping for dry areas), says Beaulieu. Some of his drought-tolerant picks include:

• Rock garden plants (designed for thin soil and arid regions).
• Succulents like hens and chicks and aloe.
• Native wildflowers.
• Ornamental grasses like purple fountain grass, yellow pampas grass, Mexican feather grass and blue oat grass.
• Drought-tolerant perennials like Sedum ‘Autumn Joy,’ Coreopsis ‘Moonbeam,’ Bluebeard (caryopteris) ‘Longwood Blue,’ lamb’s ears, maiden grass (Miscanthus sinensis ‘Gracillimus,’ blue fescue ‘Elijah Blue’ and northern sea oats.

Click here for Beaulieu’s drought tolerant landscape plan. 

Go easy on the pruning

“Prune to eliminate crowding, to prevent disease by providing better air circulation, and simply to have better-looking plants,” advises Harris. “Don’t prune shrubs into perfect – but unnatural, and very high-maintenance – shapes. If you let them be their natural size and shape they’ll look better and be healthier, too.”

Most shrubs need thinning, she adds, with old or stray branches being removed to the ground or the next major limb. “Old, overgrown or misshapen shrubs usually need renewal pruning, in which one-third of the branches are completely removed each year until they’re all gone.”  

Don’t overfeed

If your plants are looking pooped and have been neglected for a few years, go ahead and apply some organic fertilizer around their root zone once or twice early in the growing season (in addition to an organic mulch), says Harris. And veggies, annuals and anything in containers need regular feedings.

But “most plants are happiest with a yearly layer of organic mulch and at most, application of some compost in the early spring." If the plant’s doing well, she says, uneeded feeding could mean excessive growth (read: more work for you). "And don’t forget that runoff of excess fertilizer, especially the synthetic, nonorganic kind, is a huge problem for our waterways.”

Well, those are my contents of my notebook for now. Have your own easy-gardening tips? Please share them in our Comments section!

See you next time on Your Easy Garden by Tesselaar!