A Successful Home Sale

Whether you want impressive flower beds adorning the front yard or just a few carefully placed beds bordering the home, proper maintenance is a must to keep them looking their best. Your landscaping service can help you put in low-maintenance beds that will require very little input from you.

1. Install Border Edging

One of the biggest challenges with flower beds nestled against lawn areas is that lawn grasses will invade the beds and become weedy. Border edging is the secret weapon to prevent this. Your landscaping service can install edging around the flower beds to create a barrier to both roots and shoots so they can't travel into the bed. A quick trim along the edges of the beds is all the maintenance that will be required to keep grasses out. 

2. Improve the Soil

Healthy plants require less maintenance because they are less prone to pests and diseases. Good, nutrient-rich soil is the way to ensure healthy plants. Your lawn maintenance service can test the soil to determine the best fertilizer and amendment schedule for the plants you are growing. This way you never need to worry about poor soil leading to problems. 

3.  Opt for Perennials

Annual flowers produce flowers for a single season and then die, so they must be dug out and replanted often. Perennials, on the other hand, return year after year. Furthermore, many perennials are attractive through multiple seasons -- some provide flowers in spring, foliage in summer, and pretty seed heads from fall into winter. Trimming perennials back at the end of the season is typically the only major maintenance required. 

4. Apply Proper Mulch

The real key to low-maintenance flower beds is mulch. Mulch covers ugly bare soil around plants. It keeps the garden attractive, even when nothing is actively growing. Furthermore, mulch prevents evaporative soil moisture loss, suppresses weeds, and improves the soil as it decomposes. Schedule mulch applications in spring and a second time in fall if you want neat-looking winter beds.

5. Add Drip Irrigation

Flowering plants will quickly die back and look ugly if they aren't watered properly. However, over-watering and wet foliage will lead to fungal problems. The best way to avoid all of these problems is with a soaker hose on a timer or drip irrigation lines. Water is delivered directly to plant roots and with a timer so you don't have to worry about overwatering. Plus, no more time-consuming hand watering.

Contact a landscaping maintenance service, such as J. L. P. Services, for more help with your flower beds.