Low-Maintenance Gardening

Low-Maintenance Lawns
Planting Well-Adapted Plants
Mulching

With all the hustle and bustle of everyday life, as much as we love our gardens, quite often they’re the last things on our mind by the time we sit down with a glass of wine at the end of the day. That’s not to say we don’t still want them to look fabulous — we just don’t have the extra time to spend outside watering, weeding, and making a fuss over our prima donna plants. Luckily, we can still get that beautifully blooming bed with half the effort, thanks to these low-maintenance planting practices.

Low-Maintenance Lawns

If you think about your precious moments spent outside, chances are, lawn care is on your mind pretty often. While we love owning a spacious and well-kept lawn, the maintenance tends to eat up a precious chunk of our spare time, between mowing, watering, weeding, and fertilizing.

If you’re a family with lots of little ones constantly on the go in the yard, it’s understandable that you’d need a lawn. It’s a space for them to run around in nature, enjoying the fresh air, and the perfect place to show them a thing or two about passing a football. After the kids are grown up and moved on to evenings spent on homework or out with friends, one of the best ways to save time on your lawn is to increase its water holding capabilities by adding more organic material. A simple top dressing of organic compost and an application of MicroLife Humates Plus will cut back the need to water and make your lawn stronger to resist bugs and fungus as well.

Planting Well-Adapted Plants

If watering the garden is lapping up your spare time like a golden retriever with a bowl of water on a hot day, well-adapted plants may just be your solution. We are lucky in the Gulf Coast region to be able to plant a wide array of plants.  Natives are great as far as low water usage goes, but can sometimes lack in color. This is where well-adapted plants come into play. They may not be native, but they are strong, beautiful, and can take our heat with minimal care!!

Here are a few examples of  well-adapted plants

• Plumbago
• Hamelia
• Gaura
• Lantana
• Cuphea
• Tacoma Stans
• And so much more!!!!

Mulching

An underappreciated hero of low-maintenance planting, mulch is cheap and easy to install, and once it’s there, you can enjoy all these benefits and more:

• Less Watering: Mulch keeps the water in the soil from evaporating as quickly, leaving the moisture at the roots where it’s needed.
• Less Weeding: With holes left only for your existing plants to grow through, the mulch will smother anything from coming up where you don’t want it to.
• Biodiversity: Much as we might not like to think about it, a healthy yard is one filled with creepy crawlies that work to keep pests under control. From ladybugs to spiders to nematodes, mulch provides the perfect hiding places for these beneficial insects to overwinter.

We all love our gardens, but sometimes the last thing you want to do on a lazy Saturday morning is crawl out of bed to go crawl in the dirt. Sleep in guilt-free with a low-maintenance garden that will keep your yard looking fantastic, while you collect your beauty sleep.