How to Have a Beautiful Landscape When You’re Extremely Busy

Most of us want to improve our landscapes, but we know that it can cost a lot of money, take time and requires upkeep to maintain it. However, with proper preparation, you can have a beautiful landscape with little to no time spent in the garden each year.

Being extremely busy is no longer an excuse, but it does prohibit you from individual elements. You won’t be able to have a massive number of different plants which need replacing each season or large patches of grass that need to be mowed weekly.

Instead, by compromising slightly on the overall design you can end up with a landscape that is near perfect, only requires a few hours per year to maintain and that looks great every day of the year.

Design is Everything

Firstly, you need to start with an excellent design. Without taking the time to think through exactly what you want to include in your landscape, where each element will be placed and how much upkeep it requires you are going to end up with a mess.

Hire a talented landscaping company that can work with you to understand what you’re looking for and can advise you on which plants will fit your plan the best.

Evergreen Trees

Trees are a great use of space, they can be enormous, and they require little to no maintenance each year. Without trees, you’re going to have a significant chunk of space which needs to be filled with something else which will require more upkeep.

Evergreen trees are ideal because they look great all year round and they shed very little at all, meaning no more time spent bagging or blowing leaves each year.

Remember that trees purchased from a nursery will get far bigger, prepare by giving them plenty of space on each side and putting them in a wide-open area. Evergreen trees can look great on the corners of your house, but you don’t want them growing too large and being a nuisance.

Instead, plant them further away and give them the space that they need to grow and fill a part of your landscape.

Cut Back on the Grass

Just because you’re designing a landscape, that doesn’t mean that you need to have a grass lawn. Grass requires a tremendous amount of maintenance each year and even after all of that it might be dull and unattractive.

The modern solution to this is to create a stone landscape, using paving, gravel or other types of stone in place of the grass. Stone can be found in almost any color that you want, giving it the flexibility to match the rest of your design.

Stone can be found in natural forms and colors, but there are also human-made stones which are available in a large variety of colors and textures.

If you have a particularly vast landscape, then you might choose to segment it into different areas, some with stone and others with grass. This segmentation reduces the overall amount of grass in your landscape, also cutting down the number of hours you need to dedicate yearly to maintenance.

Gravel can look incredible when it is bordered by a thick wood and has evergreen plants sporadically throughout the gravel.

Automating Tasks

If you’re dedicated to reducing the amount of time that you have to spend on your landscape, then you should look into automating some of the most common tasks. One of the most common automation methods is an irrigation system.

Advanced irrigation systems will control watering and drainage for you, monitoring for rain and spraying water through sprinklers when it’s needed and draining extra water when it storms. This method prevents you from having to get out there with a hose and water the plants each week.

Plus, it can help you with drainage, preventing issues from arising and therefore reducing the time that you have to spend dealing with problems in your landscape.