Professional Tips For Easier Landscape Maintenance
Caring for your landscape can be a lot of work and, with all the other obligations in life, time is valuable and difficult to find. For that reason, we offer the following landscape maintenance tipsfrom our RightPlantz professional vendors to help you be as efficient as possible.
Landscape Maintenance Tip: Stay Ahead Of The Weeds
Weeds are the one plant you can always count on to thrive in your garden. What is the best way to keep them from taking over? Stay on top of pulling them. It is far easy and less disruptive to pull weeds when they are small and have not yet developed a solid root system. The older the weed, the more established the root system and the harder it is to fully remove them. Many weeds will re-grow from snapped off roots left in the ground. Devote a little time each week to walking around your gardens and removing small weeds that have grown since the last visit.
Landscape Maintenance Tip: Hand Prune vs. Shearing
Believe it or not, hand pruning shrubs can often be faster than pruning with shears. This is because when you hand prune, you may only be triggering one node (the place on a branch where new leaves and shoots can grow from) versus triggering many nodes when shear pruning. The more nodes that are triggered, the more growth likely to occur after pruning.
The other reason hand pruning takes less time is that there is less clean up work to do afterwards. Leaving dead debris on plants or on the ground provides a starting point for insects and fungal diseases from which to attack your plants. Hand pruning only results in minimal debris which can easily be tossed onto a tarp or into a waiting wheelbarrow. Shear pruning produces much debris which must be raked out of the plant and off the ground under the plan. Much more work.
Landscape Maintenance Tip: Keep The Design Simple
Elaborate landscapes can be stunning but what good are they if you do not have the time to maintain them. Less elaborate landscapes can also be quite beautiful, and far less demanding from a landscape maintenance standpoint. There is no reason one cannot have all the features of a grand landscape; form, texture, interest and color, without the headaches. Using the right plant in the right place is the first place to start. Using plants that mature as close as possible to the desired size, choosing the correct plants for the light exposure, and making sure that soil moisture (too much or too little) is adequate for the chosen plants are all things to consider when making selections. Getting these cultural factors right are the first step to reducing time spent on home landscape maintenance.
Landscape Maintenance Tip: Inspect Often
Taking a close look at your plants often can head off damage and work later. Examining for insects pests and fungal diseases, and catching them early, means less work later. Catching problems early and treating them results in less replacement work down the road.
Landscape Maintenance Tip: Use Ground Covers
It takes a lot of work to mulch a garden bed every year and keep it weed free throughout the season. One solution to this is to plant ground cover plants where possible. Ground covers naturally spread to cover wide areas, meaning less space that needs to be mulched each year. Ground covers also grow into a thick mass of plants, squeezing out space weeds could grow in. Some favorite ground cover plants include Pachysandra, Periwinkle, Blue Rug Juniper and Liriope.
