If you're a busy homeowner, especially if you've recently experienced life challenges like a busy season at work or increased physical limitations, you may not be able to spend as much time caring for your landscape as usual.
Here are a few ways to make a high-maintenance landscape easier to care for.
1. Set up automatic watering
If you don't already have a total watering system set up, a landscape professional can help you install one from scratch or extend a current one to reach all of your lawn and landscape beds. You can then set it up with an automatic timer, or even a smart controller that only turns on the watering system on dry days. This takes away all the work of watering.
2. Use a more informal pruning style
If you have trees and bushes that are cut in a rigidly formal topiary style, they may need trimming every couple of weeks to eliminate any stray leaves and twigs. Switching to a softer look and less formal style can allow the plants more time to grow in between trimmings. For example, an informal hedge may only need pruning once a year or less, making it a low-maintenance choice.
3. Hire landscape maintenance services
Landscape maintenance services can help you care for any landscape tasks that still need to be accomplished, such as raking, pruning, and seasonal planting. Depending on the size of your landscape and its needs, you can set up more frequent maintenance visits or less frequent ones.
4. Build up the soil
If your landscape plants have deep, fertile soil to draw from, they won't need constant applications of fertilizer. Adding compost and other soil amendments such as peat moss can often help increase the quality of your soil. While this can be hard work, it can pay off down the road, and you can have your landscape maintenance professionals help with the heavy lifting.
5. Replace trouble plants and trees
If you have an especially troublesome plant or tree, you can simply replace it with one that won't give you any trouble. For instance, a bush or tree that constantly drops debris on your driveway and stains it could be replaced with a tree that only sheds once or twice a year.
These steps can help you minimize the amount of work you personally need to put into your beautifully manicured landscape. Get in touch with a landscape maintenance company, such as Lopez Tree Service, to learn more about hiring professional services for landscape care.
After thinking about how to keep some of the flowers in my yard alive, it occurred to me that we had some real problems on our hands. For starters, we had a bunch of overgrown trees that needed to be dealt with. The second thing we had to take care of was the fact that we were really behind on basic yard care. I started talking with friends and neighbors about what they did to make things better, and they recommended a local tree service company. After they came out and made some changes, my yard was gorgeous. Learn more about tree care on my blog.