With the golds, reds, and oranges of falling leaves and the soft patter of rain, fall is a beautiful time of the year. Later there’s the first frost and the first snow, adding a layer of white to everything you see from your window. Unfortunately, in addition to the beautiful view, those leaves, rain, ice, and snow can cause landscape maintenance headaches. How can you reduce your fall landscape maintenance and increase your enjoyment of your fall garden?

Seek Out Low-Maintenance Trees and Shrubs

If you’re adding new landscaping elements to your garden or removing and replacing old ones, look at the maintenance of the plants that you install. Add evergreen trees and shrubs instead of deciduous ones, and you’ll have a different kind of beauty in your yard: one that stays green all winter long. In cool, rainy climates, azaleas and rhododendrons are lovely all-season plant choices, and over time, rhododendrons can grow to the size of a small tree. Japanese Aralia or Fatsia japonica is a fast-growing shrub with large, maple-shaped leaves. Laurels are tall and tree-like, and bay laurels have the added bonus of bay leaves for your soup. When plant shopping, look for evergreen relatives of your favorite plants as well, such as the evergreen viburnum.

Set Up Your Landscape for Mulch and Drainage

If you have a landscape with deciduous plants and plenty of rain or snow melt, why not set up that landscape for easy, successful maintenance. If you have to have your leaves hauled away, set up beds where you can use those leaves under the trees and shrubs as a winter mulch to enrich your soil. If the abundance of water and snow in the fall and winter months causes flooding in your garden, add contours to your garden landscape that divert the water into a pond, water feature, or wetland or simply allow it to sink slowly into the ground. By investing now in preventative landscape maintenance, you’ll reap the benefits of less work and lower costs for many years to come.

Add Structural Features to Support Your Landscape Maintenance

What landscaping structures in and around your home will help make your landscape maintenance easier and less expensive? Whether it’s a shed at the end of the garden or new gutters to reduce roof leaks, investing in equipment can lead to excellent returns in the long run. In addition to new structures, make sure that you do an early fall checkup of all of your existing structures to ensure that they’re working well. This could include looking for roof leaks, sagging gutters, or driveway potholes that could freeze and crack in the late fall.

Preventative maintenance pays off. For example, adding a gutter guard to your gutters means that you no longer need to remove debris from your gutters and downspouts. You may find that the gutter guard cost is easy to recoup when you account for all of the time you used to spend cleaning out your gutters by hand or the money you spent to hire someone to get up on that ladder instead.

Do you want to spend more time enjoying your garden and less time maintaining it? Visit Harry Helmet. Our Gutter Helmet and Helmet Heat products will help your gutters run clean, clear, and ice-free throughout the fall and winter months, making your landscaping tasks much easier. Contact us today for a quote.

Written by Del Thebaud