By Robert Sharoff
For most people, an ideal garden would be full of flowers and require no maintenance at all. But short of using silk flowers, that type of garden just doesn’t exist. One can, however, minimize maintenance with careful planning.
Low maintenance does not equal boring. You don’t have to settle for a shopping-mall landscape just because you are time-starved.
What follows are tips to get you started. And if all else fails? Well, try the ultimate low-maintenance approach: Hire a gardener.
Don’t try to do rare tropical blooms or Pacific Northwest rain forest perennials. Choosing the right plants is half the battle. The more stress plants are under from inappropriate soil and climate, the more likely they are to succumb to insects and disease.
Instead of rigid borders and beds with everything evenly spaced, try a more naturalistic approach with plants such as ferns and wildflowers that are supposed to look a little messy and freeform.
Annuals, for example, need to be dug up every year. Vegetables are highly susceptible to pests. But ornamental grasses and herbs can fend for themselves in most situations.
Favor more trees and shrubs and flowers over grass. A lawn takes more maintenance than just about anything else you can plant. You have to mow and fertilize it and keep it disease-free. It also takes a lot of water.
If you can’t live without grass, raise the blade on your mower to 3 inches or so. A closely cropped lawn – say 1 or 2 inches tall – increases plant stress, which in turn increases maintenance. And because taller grass more effectively shades the ground, it discourages weed growth.
Mulching inhibits weed growth and helps the soil retain moisture. A layer of organic mulch should be between two and four inches deep. Avoid using sawdust as a mulch, as it eats up nitrogen as it decomposes.
A conventional sprinkler is one of the most inefficient and wasteful ways of watering your garden. Far better are various drip-irrigation systems: porous hoses concealed under mulch that distribute water where it’s needed. There are also systems for container gardens that consist of a main hose with smaller tubes every few inches that go directly into different pots.
Are a few dandelions such a bad thing? And if they are, why spray the whole lawn? Go dig them up. The same is true with insects. People tend to panic when they see an insect or insect damage. The key is to know your enemy. A single tomato worm can do a lot of damage to a tomato patch, but it’s only one worm. Find it and squish it.
A single application of time-release fertilizer at the beginning of the season is enough for most gardens. If you add enough compost and manure to the soil, you may not have to fertilize at all.
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