Category Archives: low maintenance gardening

drought tolerant plants, low maintenance gardening

Tips for Easy Gardening this Summer

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April  showers will bring an abundance of May flowers around here.  And that’s just one of the perks of a cool, rainy spring. Shrubs and perennials will have longer to establish a good root system before hot weather arrives and ground covers will have time to spread and shade the soil conserving moisture come summer. What strategies can you follow that will this summer and give you extra time to enjoy it?

Plant in masses. When designing or reworking your garden, make it easy on yourself by planting fewer varieties but in greater numbers. Planting this way will reduce the number of different maintenance tasks for that area. For example, if you have a large hillside that you want to cover, plant it with a groundcover like ceanothus gloriosus which fans out 6-15 feet. Some manzanitas like arctotaphylos uva-ursi eventually spread to 15 feet each.  A shady spot could be planted with ajuga which spreads aggressively but in the right spot you’ll welcome a thug like this to cover the ground quickly. Same goes for Goldilocks lysimachia. Give it an inch and it’ll take a mile but that might be just what you want under a tree.

Another time saving strategy is to group plants with similar moisture needs. This may sound like a no brainer but if you have just one prima donna in a bed of more drought tolerant plants, you’ll be dragging the hose over to that bed for just one plant. If you find that some of your plants are not quite as low water as you’d like, move those to their own spot. In general, plants with large leaves usually require more water and transpire faster while drought tolerant plants typically have one of more of the following characteristics: deep taproots and leaves that are smaller, silver, fuzzy or succulent.

Another watering time-saver is to avoid putting thirsty plants in hard-to-reach places. If the irrigation system doesn’t reach that far, keep it simple by planting drought tolerant woody shrubs or perennials there.

Pluck weeds when the soil is moist and before they have gone to seed. Even if you don’t get the entire root of more persistent weeds, just keep pulling at the new growth. Eventually, the plant will give up having used up all of the food stored in its roots.

Plant edibles among your other plants near the kitchen. Tricolor sage looks great alongside other plants with pink and violet leaves. Purple basil planted below the silver foliage of an artichoke is another great combination. Lemon thyme growing next to a burgundy colored dwarf New Zealand flax would look spectacular, too. And don’t forget to plant decorative and delicious Bright Lights swiss chard with its stalks of yellow, orange, pink, purple, red, green and white throughout your beds. One of the easiest vegetables to grow, it is actually a form of beet from the Mediterranean area.

So get the lemonade ready to enjoy all your free time this season. It’s bound to get warm eventually.

compact shrubs, low maintenance gardening

November Gardening tips

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We all want to in the garden. Who wants a high maintenance landscape that takes up all our resources? If you grow edibles you already know they take a bit of care so it’s even more important to have the rest of the yard more sustainable.

As much as we would like, there’s no such thing as a no maintenance garden. Perennials and grasses, for instance, need a haircut in the spring  before they reward us with beautiful flowers and foliage that shimmers in the breeze. Your garden can be truly low maintenance, however, if you follow a few guidelines.

Shrubs, planted in exactly the right place needs little pruning or maintenance. There they can be allowed to happily grow to their full potential and beauty.  A garden needs foliage color, texture and form for interest year round.  An evergreen shrub that meets all of these requirements and then some is Coprosma. Valued for ease of maintenance in difficult situations and able to get by on little water when necessary, the foliage is a show stopper.

During the growing season the variegated foliage of Evening Glow is pink and gold and in the winter it turns orange-red.  The variety, Rainbow Surprise, is pink and cream for most of the year but the leaves are washed with red In the fall and winter. These tidy shrubs stay low and compact and look beautiful as foundation plants, in borders, short hedges and containers. Not bothered by pest or diseases you can plant it and forget it.

If you already have a tree, shrub or perennial that is suffering from insufficient space or the wrong light conditions, now’s the time to move it. Water the plant first and allow the moisture to be taken up into the plant. Then prepare the new hole. Be sure to fill the hole with water if it’s dry. Dig up as much of the root ball as is practical to move, keeping it intact. Lift or lever the plant onto a tarp and pull or carry it to its new location. Replant at the same depth and keep watered but not soggy. Next year you won’t be troubled by extra pruning or diseases as you’ll have the right plant in the right spot.

An easy task to do while you’re out enjoying the garden is to comb out the off-color blades of evergreen grasses such as blue oat or blue fescue. Striking in the winter garden, these grasses will look fresh if you don some of those rubber coated gloves and run your fingers through the grass. The brown blades will come right out while leaving the healthy steel blue leaves intact. Try it. It’s worth a few minutes of your time.