Keeping your garden tidy and presentable can be a real challenge when you’ve got kids. The garden is one of the main play spots for suburban families. This creates a trade off between the garden being used as a practical area or a decorative space. However this gap can be narrowed with some clever garden maintenance/planning techniques. Any family garden will never be entirely decorative; but it can still be kept in good shape.
First off you need to assess what the main uses of your garden are. Knowing this will allow you to plan and observe where wear & tear is likely to occur. If you have boys in your garden it’s more likely they’re sporty and playing football or soccer on the lawn. This can cause the grass to wear very quickly and it also creates a situation where it’s harder for the grass to recover. In such cases you are going to want to make sure you’ve got a low maintenance hard wearing lawn grass. This can be bought from seed very cheaply, or in rolls of turf if you want to take a shortcut and lay it straight away. This type of lawn turf can take a lot of stress but still looks presentable and pleasing to the eye. Even if you don’t have kids constantly running on the lawn buying a hard wearing turf can save you a lot of labor hours in the garden.
If you’re garden is big enough, you can segregate it into sections to be used for different purposes. Many people do this by keeping the lawn area for children, and having a separate decking area for parents and adults to relax on. Decking doesn’t necessarily need to be at the house end of the garden; it can be free standing or cornered against a fence. Having this separation allows kids to still use the garden for its intended purpose, whilst keeping it decorative in certain areas. It is the best of both worlds and turns the garden into an area where the whole family can be content and happy.
There are several simple maintenance techniques that can be used to keep gardens in good shape even with kids around. For example with lawns that are walked on regularly, you should be raking them around once every two weeks. This helps loosen up trampled grass and promote upward growth that is full and lush. The specific techniques you use will depend on how your garden is used; but there are lots of simple ways to keep everything ticking over.
This article is by Peter McAllister who represents a company that sells garden machinery such as scarification units that help automatically rake and tend to busy lawns. See their full range of groundcare machinery by clicking here.
