While having a beautiful, green lawn seems to be the ideal goal for most householders, it actually creates a great deal of work and cost in fertilizing, mowing, and watering. While it is possible to install an automatic watering system, there is no way to get automatic mowing – unless you hire someone else to do it or use a robotic lawnmower..
Creating large gardens will reduce the lawn area, but much use should be made of perennial plants and mulching or the time saved in mowing will be spent in maintaining the gardens. Don’t plant anything that needs pruning, renewing or much of anything else in the garden. Go for shrubs of all sizes, groundcovers and even bulbs that come up year after year.
Check out our Guide to Low Maintenance Landscaping to learn more beyond the grass.
Replace Lawn With Another Surface
Replace the lawn with water – in the form of a large lily pond or a swimming pool. The swimming pool can be surrounded by decking and/or artificial grass. This may be rather more expensive than a small fishpond, but it will add value and create a wonderful – and safe – place for the kids to play. Pools also create coolness in the environment.
Make paths; the addition of paths meandering through your lawn will certainly create interest. And if they also divide the lawn into sections, mowing will be easier – and reduced slightly, depending on how many paths there are. Making them wider than usual will take away more lawn without taking away from the space.
Check out 3 Walkway Options for a Beautiful Landscape
Growing larger trees will prevent the lawn from growing as quickly because grass needs sunlight to grow well. However, bare patches can look unsightly so pebbles may need to be added underneath the trees.
Replace the lawn with a no-mow grass. Replacing the lawn altogether with a different kind of grass can also be a solution to reduce mowing time. No-mow grasses include sheep and other kinds of fescue. These grasses do need mowing but only around three times per year. They are slow growers, but do not grow as tall as other turf grass.
If planting a no-mow mixture on a slope a grass blanket may need to be put down so that rain does not wash the fine seed to the bottom of the slope before it can germinate. This will soon rot down into the soil. No-mow mixes can be sown over the top of other turf and will eventually crowd it out.