Side of the house before completing our landscaping without grass
When it comes to landscaping, well, pretty much everything around the house, actually, I’m one of those neighbors that tries to stay on top of its maintenance. Pulling weeds, mowing every week, picking up leaves in the fall, in other words, always making sure it (and the house in general) looks nice.
However, the fact that I stay on top of everything does not mean that I enjoy the work. In fact, I do not enjoy landscaping work, at all. You may have guessed this by now, though. Because as you know, I like using lots of rocks, which usually help a lot with weed control, meaning, less long term maintenance, even though they’re harder to spread than other materials.
Living in our second house didn’t help, the fact that it was in a corner lot and basically surrounded by grass meant that we had a lot to mow and take care of, not only on the front of the house but also, on the sides. That included all landscape maintenance during the warmer months, not to mention the huge amount of water it required, and snow shoveling the sidewalks during in the winter.
Don’t get me wrong, not all was bad, corner lots have many benefits, but yard maintenance was not one of them.
OUR LOW MAINTENANCE, LOW WATER, NO GRASS LANDSCAPING
When we chose our current house, we made sure we didn’t pick a corner lot. A benefit of this particular house was that the sides and backyard landscaping areas were not done (the front does have a bit of grass), so that gave us the opportunity to do them the way we wanted. That meant, coming up with an idea for a low maintenance, low water, no grass landscaping.
I have presented two different landscaping projects on this site before, you can check them out here and here. This time, however, I don’t want to bother you with all the details, because they’re basically the same:
- Spraying and pulling out lots and lots of weeds
- Cleaning up and leveling all the area
- Digging holes and planting new trees
- Digging a small trench and running an irrigation line for the new trees
- Installing landscape edging
- Installing landscape fabric
- Using pavers to create a walkway to access the back of the house (new step)
- Spreading a total of 15 tons of 1 ½ tricolor rock
- Spreading 3 cubic yards of mulch
- Enjoy the new low maintenance, low water, no grass landscaping!
To make it way easier and faster to finish the job, this time, we went ahead and rented out a mini skid steer! What a great difference it made! We were done in almost no time, and it was a lot of FUN to ride on and work with.
Having fun with the mini skid steer. It made the job way easier
After a few days of work, we were extremely pleased with the results. The most important part is that with this low maintenance, low water, no grass landscaping there’s almost no need to pull weeds, there’s no need to waste huge amounts of water and there’s no need to mow. We love it!
The Before and After photos of our yard. We love our new landscaping without grass
Readers, do you enjoy landscaping work? Have you ever thought of a low maintenance, low water option without grass? What do you think of our idea?
Working on your own low maintenance, low water, no grass landscaping? This is what you need:
- Screwdrivers and hand tools (always useful)
- Weed killer
- Rotary Tiller (optional)
- Shovel, Bow & leaf rakes
- Trencher (optional)
- Sprinkler tubing, heads and connectors
- Landscape edging and fabric, including pins to hold them in place
- River rock
- Wheelbarrow, or even better, a mini skid steer!
- Trees
- Decorative pavers & concrete blocks (optional)
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