Garden - reducing the work

Lighter battery lawn mower for the grass with evergreen shrubs in borders. Will petrol mowers be banned? They do produce a lot of emissions. Yes shrubs need trimming but usually not every year and only if a desired shape is wanted. A hedge trimmer/shears does the job in minutes. Plant spring and summer flowering bulbs, amongst the shrubs for variation and colour. I have a fair sized area of grasses all different sizes and colours. You don't need to trim them every year although some of the experts say you should, I don't as I love seeing the sway of the tall ones even in the winter. Pots are lovely but oh so much work and can be heavy for moving. Good luck, sure you will find a solution you will enjoy.

Had a look at finances a few months ago and now have a gardener come every couple weeks. £15 a hour and well worth it. He came two weeks ago for 3 hours and did what would have taken me 3 days to do. He's doing the heavier and more back breaking work.

pat9

Hetty58 your neighbour's hedge should not be higher than 2 metres. I have them on both sides - one at the front and one at the back and it annoys me that I have to trim other people's hedges!

This is absolutely true and they are obliged by law to keep the height down

We re-landscaped our last garden for just this reason. It was quite expensive to do but meant that the garden always looked lovely with relatively little effort.
We had raised beds with wide walls at the edges so that I could sit and weed them easily, and replaced the grass with gravel. If gravel is laid properly it will have a compacted base and then landscaping fabric underneath it so weeds can't grow well but rain can still soak through. A quick going over with a rake will pull weeds out and if you do it often enough the weeds are tiny and just shrivel away. Of course you can choose to grow plants in the gravel if that is the kind of garden that you like.
I chose to have some beds for herbaceous plants which obviously could need weeding, but you can plant through landscaping fabric and put bark or other mulch on top - you need to use the coarser bark not the composted stuff which can support weed growth. We didn't use the fabric and found that there were few weeds which we kept down with a long-handled hoe.
You can grow many plants up walls which makes the garden look lush and green but doesn't need much flower bed underneath to grow from.
Sadly we no longer have that garden and I really miss it.

We have just got our front garden block paved. it means we can parks both cars on the driveway and not in the road as can visitors. No weeding and no cutting grass which was playing havoc with my back. We have the back garden fairly up together with little weeding and just grass to cut. Maybe this year we can sit and enjoy it rather than worrying about getting it all done

I want to get rid of my lawn eventually and have a mix of cobbles and gravel with low-growing ground cover. Hardy perennials come back each year without much effort. I never put in bedding plants as they're 'here today gone tomorrow' so not worth the effort.

I rarely dig unless I'm planting something new. I'm a lazy gardener - I enjoy looking at it but no longer wish to put in the effort.

I’ve got pots for colour which I keep small conifers and a touch of Ivy in them just add winter pansies and in summer add whatever is colourful, I’ve invested in 4 beautiful large contemporary statues and a very small patch of grass for the dog. Pretty painted fences, it’s low maintenance because husband puts pots on a table for me to change the plants and he cuts the small patch of grass which literally takes 10 minutes. Added 4 nice lanterns which are stuck in 4 of the pots and it looks pretty, peaceful (shame the neighbours are noisy) but it’s easy to manage and calm

I would think about putting decorative stones down,lots of choice and colours and easy to maintain.

We moved to a bungalow but it has quite a large back garden. We have just had a large patio laid right across the back which has cut down the lawn area considerably. I am digging a shrub border along one side to add some colour and soften the look. We will have an outdoor sofa and table next summer and also a table and chairs. Some pots of summer flowers are easy too. I'm glad we did it, looks great too.

Also the roots come over into my flower beds

Hetty58 your neighbour's hedge should not be higher than 2 metres. I have them on both sides - one at the front and one at the back and it annoys me that I have to trim other people's hedges!

I detest seeing grass disappear. The reason there is more and more flooding is because rain has nowhere to go. Think hard before you remove your lawn....

All of the above good suggestions and also arnica pills to suck a few times a day when you’re overdoing it in the garden really helps some people with aches and pains.

I'm getting my garden landscaped hopefully March/April and getting a lot of it paved. Leaving a small lawn for the dog , one long flower bed only with evergreen shrubs that don't need much looking after and then I'll do pots with annuals to save bending. I'm ok at the minute, but moved to my bungalow and have been renovating it to suit me as I get older as I live alone and have no family.

Grammaretto where did you advertise for your young and trained helper?

I’m only in my late 50’s but I noticed that a back twinge and tennis elbow caused in the spring by digging, is still bothering me now. I’m watching with interest to see what other posters advise as I need to make some changes too.

Before embarking on expensive changes consider whether you might be better downsizing your garden. We decided to make ours low maintenance when we retired and made our paths wider, the lawn smaller, the patio bigger, the veg garden got raised beds and any shrub needing replaced was replaced by slow growing evergreens.
Then we moved house but the upside was that the garden helped sell the house to a pair of retired doctors who wanted to be near their daughter who lived nearby.

Yes the lightweight lawnmower is a pleasure to use. This is the one I bought.
www.argos.co.uk/product/7366682

I changed my circular vegetable plot to a flower bed, with perennials and shrubs, underplanted with lots of bulbs. It is a bit crowded, but I can't see the weeds! I followed a neighbour's example of planting a couple of narrow garden forks to steady me as I pick my way over the stepping stones. With RA my ankles don't bend as they used to.
I also pay a local man to cut my steep lawn once a fortnight - £15 well spent.
Casdon, I too love my little Bosch rechargeable trimmer
Bosch trimmer

I should also say, I pay for 2 hours garden work each week. My gardener is a young woman with a qualification in horticulture so she knows how to prune. and has a strong young back.
Your garden sounds fabulous Esspee

I was rather sad to see when I last looked, how many gardens in cities have their front gardens turned over to a car space. My DB who lives in Denmark, has high raised beds in his and grows all his veg in his sunny front garden .
He has grown a beech hedge to screen it from the road but some of his neighbours have now followed suit!

I’ve just thought of something else that makes my garden a lot easier than it used to be- I got a rechargeable shrub and hedge trimmer last year. I’m too much of a wuss to try a big electric one, but this is perfect for shrubs, also jobs like cutting the dead stems off sedums, euphorbia etc. It saves loads of time and effort.

It all depends on the size of your garden. making a 30ft square garden low maintenance is one thing. Making half an acre low maintenance is another.

My garden is 60ft by 150ft. I have gone for lots of shrubberies and bulbs (veg patch aside). They do need trimming, but this can be done slowly over Autumn-winter or you get someone in for a day to do it.

With modern lawnmowers, grass is not that demanding to cut. We have a motor mower at the back, but this year, partly because we have builders in, and partly because getting the big mower from front to back is hard work, I am buying a small battery powered mower to use on our quite small front lawn. We also have contractors who come in 4 times a year to weed and feed the lawn areas

I think, given the flooding problems and the environmental issues, that it's awful to change to a 'low maintenance' garden. Concrete and fake grass just add to the problems yet so many people have taken that route, as I've noticed when browsing the houses for sale websites

Lawns are relatively low maintenance if they just need cutting and there are plenty of people who do lawn mowing for a living - not all of them charge a fortune (and it's really only in the summer that it needs doing). Plants that need little attention with mulch or something in between to keep the weeds down look much nicer than decking and patios that fill the whole space.

There are plenty of more interesting and environmentally friendly ways of making a garden easier to manage, as all the suggestions above show.

I was thinking of going for evergreen shrubs with varying leaf colour and shapes. By shapes I mean topiary. I have, over time, raised box cubes, cones and balls which are all in the front garden and give a nice formality and a look of a well kept garden even in winter.
In the back garden I have a couple of privet balls, one green one gold, again they give interest and a splash of colour.
I find clipping into shape therapeutic and it doesn’t have to be done often. I could use various coloured euonymus and hebes.
Problem is I have loads of perennials and the garden is always a blaze of flowers in the summer. It’s the raking up, the weeds and the splitting before they go woody which gives me backache and the couch grass coming in from next door. I may try to restrict flowers to pots as suggested
The lawn is my OH’s territory. I thought of replacing it with gravel but gravel is a wonderful seed bed and weeding is something I want to escape from.

We use permeable plastic weed supressant on our allotment, we couldn't manage without it. You can use it under gravel or chipped bark in the garden, it's saved us a huge amount of work. I'm 73 and DH is nearly 83, a friend recommended it to us , I think we would have given up on the allotment otherwise.