Easy, Low-Maintenance Garden | Tips and Tricks | IBRAN

You've got enough on your plate: watching the kids playing in the garden, enjoying some sunshine, walking the dogs. Here's how you can enjoy your garden with less to do to maintain it.

No garden is complete without an area to entertain your neighbours but you're worried what they might think to the patch of nettles slowly beginning to dominate what used to be a well maintained garden bed. You worry what would happen if you took a two week trip to visit the Algarve. Do you need to book a gardener in to take care of things?

One day you're away and there's a constant downpour - it is the UK after all - and those nettles are starting to look a little more imposing with all the watering they've had.The footpath is getting a little slippery with all the moss growing over it and you've now got to consider jet blasting the path before the children arrive.

So you ask yourself: what can I do to make this all a little easier to look after?

Here are just three small changes and investments you can make to reduce time spent on maintenance of your garden, so you, your friends, kids and grandkids can enjoy your garden for longer.

Tackling the weeds before they take over.

When you're having drinks in the garden and you've got half the village round inspecting your borders, the last thing you will want them to see is nettles and brambles poking up amongst your rockery. You could spend hours each week fighting them off, especially in the height of summer, but you've got enough to do getting ready for the occasion itself without adding another daunting task into the mix.

So you take a look at weedkiller options - roundup, gallup, resolva - all these brands start to show up on Amazon and eBay. Then you remember seeing an article about some of the health issues and potential scares surrounding glyphosate. Proven or not, you decide it's still not worth it and it's something that you'd have to do regularly anyway, so it hasn't saved you any time.

How about weed suppressant? You put some of this down under your composite decking a few years ago and there have been no weeds since. Maybe it'll work in your garden beds, with some bark or gravel over the top and your bushes poking through?

Lots of our customers ask us about using FABREX weed suppressant in their gardens for exactly this. You can pick an entire roll up for less than 40p a square meter and you've got enough to cover your beds, driveway and line the new patio slabs you're getting installed too.

So this is the kind of purchase that you can make once, install once and leave to look after itself, reducing the amount of time you need to spend maintaining your garden.

The grass has started creeping into the borders and you have to cut the edges back every year.

No amount of mowing the grass seems to quite tackle this issue and now you're having to pull grass out from the beds and dig out the edges again and again. There's no definition or edge at which the grass stops and the beds begin. It doesn't look quite right.

Making it easier and less repetitive by choosing to retain those cut edges with some plastic edging, rather than ritually going out every month and cutting the edges back with your edging tool. The fact it's plastic makes it long lasting and maintenance free because, as we so often hear, plastic does not break down in the environment. Surely it's better in your garden doing something useful than floating in rivers and seas?

So for this reason we introduced IBRANEDGE.

It's no secret that this product has saved so many of our customers hours already. It's simple enough to install, so that any extra effort doesn't outweigh the time saving benefits.

You simply cut the edge back to a straight line, face the edging up to it and anchor it with the anchor pegs included in the pack.

If you like your curved edges, that's also easy to do - you just trim the plastic struts (pop the cut parts back into recycling) and easily bend the edge to suit.

Remember that garden path that's starting to become slippery?

It's starting to look a little tired anyway so you're considering replacing it with something less hands on. Had you considered replacing them with a plastic gravel grid?

This corner of the market has grown exponentially over the last few years and whilst there are plenty to choose from, none of them have anti-slip nodules in-built into their design quite like IBRADRIVE.

With this product you can do away with unsightly weed-ridden paving that needs to be maintained and replace it with a gravel path that won't lose its stones. The grid structure holds the stones in, whilst provding a solid surface to which shoes or tyres can grip. So when you have guests over who require a wheelchair, they too can get involved in your garden party.

Wheel, walk, run around - there's no stone loss, slipping or slime to contend with making this the ideal garden path alternative.

So with all this in mind, would you like to keep your garden maintained without actually having to maintain it?

See our Maintenance Free Collection for more inspiration.