Between work, school, activities, errands, and everything else on the family calendar, maintaining a beautiful backyard can easily become another chore. Fortunately, you don’t have to spend every weekend mowing, weeding, watering, and pruning to enjoy an attractive outdoor space. With thoughtful landscaping choices, your Central Florida backyard can be both beautiful and relatively easy to maintain. The key is to design the landscape around the way your family actually uses it while choosing plants, materials, and lawn areas that don’t demand constant attention.
Here are some ways to create a backyard that gives your family more time to enjoy it — and less time to maintain it!
Think About How Your Family Uses the Backyard
Think about what you do outdoors. Do your kids need an area to run and play? Do you host cookouts often? Do you have a dog that likes to roam around? Do you appreciate relaxing and observing nature in a quiet spot? The answers should influence your landscape design.
For example, if your children regularly play soccer or toss a football, maintaining a large lawn area makes sense. If your family primarily uses the backyard for entertaining, you may want to dedicate more space to a patio or outdoor living area and less to turfgrass. As for dogs, letting them have the run of the property may sound like a good thing, but can wreak havoc on the appearance of your yard and health of your grass. Our blog post — “How to Make Your Backyard Dog-Friendly” — covers ways to turn your backyard into a personal, secure play zone for your fur baby.
A low-maintenance landscape doesn’t mean eliminating the lawn altogether. It means using lawn where it provides the most value and avoiding unnecessary turf in areas where it isn’t being used. Consider how you intend to use your landscape when determining the appropriate balance of turf, planting beds, trees, and other features.
Choose Florida Native and Florida-Friendly Plants
One of the biggest mistakes homeowners make is choosing plants based primarily on how they look at the garden center. Instead, consider whether a plant is suited to your property’s soil, sunlight, drainage, and moisture conditions. Using plants that are native to Florida or suitable to Florida’s climate will make maintenance easier.
University of Florida IFAS Gardening Solutions developed the Florida-Friendly Landscaping™ Program. It consists of nine principles that work together to promote sustainable landscaping practices that use less water, reduce pollution and protect natural resources. Our blog post — “How to Create a Florida-Friendly Yard” — covers this topic in detail, and includes our recommendations for seven great shrubs and flowering plants that will add beautiful low-maintenance color and texture to your landscape. Our blog post — “Advantages of Landscaping with Florida Native Plants” — provides even more planting tips and plant recommendations!
Choose Trees and Shrubs Carefully
Trees and shrubs can provide shade, privacy, structure, and beauty, but some varieties require significantly more pruning and cleanup than others. When selecting larger plants, consider their mature size rather than how large they are when you purchase them. A plant that eventually grows too large for its location may require frequent pruning — or eventually need to be removed and replaced.
It’s also important to avoid planting trees too close to structures, fences, air-conditioning equipment, or other features where their mature growth could create maintenance problems. A little planning at planting time can save considerable work later.
Reduce Unnecessary Turf Areas
Grass is useful, especially for families with children and pets, but maintaining turf requires regular mowing, fertilization, aeration, and other care. If there are portions of your backyard that no one uses, consider replacing some of the turf with groundcovers, mulch, hardscaping, or other landscape features. Keep in mind that reducing turf doesn’t mean eliminating your back lawn. It means keeping grass where it provides value, and using other landscape elements where they make more sense.
Use Groundcovers for Difficult Areas
Groundcovers can be an attractive alternative to grass in certain areas of the backyard, particularly where mowing is difficult. They can also help cover bare soil and create a finished appearance around trees, shrubs, and other landscape features.
However, not every groundcover is appropriate for every Central Florida property. Select varieties based on sunlight, soil, moisture, and the amount of foot traffic the area receives. For a family backyard, it’s especially important to distinguish between areas intended for foot traffic and areas that are primarily decorative. Our blog post — “How to Elevate Your Landscape with Groundcovers” — provides additional information, and recommends eight versatile, low-maintenance plants.
Use Mulch to Cut Down on Weeds and Watering
Mulch is one of the simplest ways to make landscape beds easier to maintain — as well as giving them a clean, finished appearance that elevates the look of the entire backyard. A properly applied layer of mulch can help suppress weeds, reduce evaporation, moderate soil temperatures, and protect the soil. That can mean less time spent pulling weeds and watering plants.
And mulch isn’t just good for your plants; it’s good for your soil. Organic mulches can add nutrients to the soil as they decompose. This improves your soil’s aeration, structure, drainage, and ability to hold nutrients. Mulch can even help reduce erosion and protect plants from certain diseases.
Reliable Peat Company recommends laying mulch three inches deep to achieve the greatest benefits in insulation, moisture conservation and inhibiting weed growth. Make sure to not apply mulch directly against tree trunks or woody stems.
Group Plants According to Their Water Needs
Not every plant in your backyard needs the same amount of water. Grouping plants with similar irrigation requirements together can make watering more efficient and simplify landscape maintenance. It also prevents you from having to overwater one plant simply because a neighboring plant needs more moisture. This concept — also known as hydrozoning — can be particularly helpful when designing or renovating an irrigation system.
Create Defined Outdoor Living Areas
Hardscaping can be another useful component of a low-maintenance backyard. A patio, walkway, seating area, or outdoor dining space requires very different maintenance than a planting bed or lawn.
Creating defined spaces can also make your backyard more functional. For example, you could have:
A play area: A durable lawn area where children can run and play.
An entertaining area: A patio with outdoor furniture and a grill.
A garden area: A relatively small planting bed featuring carefully selected plants.
A relaxation area: A shaded seating area beneath a tree or near a landscape feature.
The goal is to make every part of the backyard serve a purpose.
The Take-Home Message
For Central Florida families, the best backyard is not the one that needs constant care. It is the one that gives you chances to step outside, spend time together, and enjoy your home. Our experienced experts at Daniel’s Lawn Care & Pressure Washing can design, plant and even maintain the yard of your dreams!
In addition to landscaping design, our full-service company provides plant and tree installation, tree trimming, yard maintenance, pressure washing and so much more. Contact us today so we can do the work, and you can do the enjoying! We proudly serve all of Central Florida — including Orlando, Sanford, Longwood and Lake Mary! We look forward to helping you achieve your goals and bring your vision to life!
