How To Create Maintenance Free Lawns

By gardener | Mar 15, 2009

If you’ve ever dreamed of having a beautiful lawn that hardly ever needed to be watered, cut, trimmed, or weeded, you’re in luck. It’s not just the wishful thinking of a lazy gardener. You can in fact, create a lush lawn with just those specifications, as long as you start by planting the right thing.

So what’s the right thing? Ground covers. Grass will eat up water like crazy, and constantly need to be trimmed, weeded, mowed, and fed. A lush grass lawn is actually a monster just waiting to suck up all your time and energy, while running up your water bill in the process.

In contrast, by planting low growing ground covers which flourish in your area naturally, you’ll eliminate a lot of your day to day lawn care chores. Now the key here of course, is to select a ground cover which will thrive in your area naturally. When the ground cover is native to your gardening zone, it will often do quite well on whatever amount of natural rainfall you get. Sometimes you’ll need to give it a bit of extra water of course, such as during a drought or when the new plants are first becoming established in your yard.

Once the plants take hold however, they should be able to live on their own with very little attention from you. And many ground covers will naturally spread themselves out over time, which is quite helpful when you need to cover bare spots or choke out annoying weeds.

This is actually a common charactoristic of a ground cover plant, and it’s part of why they’re called this. Because they grow outwards on their own, and cover the ground surrounding them.

Like plants and flowers though, not all ground covers are the same. Some will be quite low growing – reaching heights of just three to five inches. Others of course might grow as tall as ten inches when left untrimmed, and this can create a wonderful naturalized look in your yard.

Some ground covers will create flower clusters while others may not seem to create any flowers at all. Some will have lush, dark green foilage, and others may look pale and silverish instead.

Knowing what you want as an end result for your yard will help you decide what to plant for your ground cover. If for instance, you like a somewhat wild and natural look, you might choose to plant a ground cover which grows a bit taller than others. If you know that will cause you to want to trim it down though because it looks unkempt, take a look at the lower growing ground covers instead.

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