Roadside landscaping brings beauty to your community, but taking care of landscaping can be expensive and time consuming. If you want to keep long-term maintenance costs low, there are several tips you may want to keep in mind when designing your landscaping.
1. Opt for Automatic Watering
If you constantly have to send a grounds crew to water the landscaping, you may ultimately end up wasting more time than you need to. To cut down on wasted time, consider putting in an underground sprinkler system or drip hoses connected to a timed watering system. That costs a little money up front, but it will save you a lot of time down the line, as you will be able to water remotely and automatically.
2. Focus on Drought-Resistant Plants
Whether automatic watering is possible or not, you may want to focus on drought-resistant plants. Look for hardy plants that are designed to look great with little effort in your climate. Succulents, such as the prickly pear, are ones to consider, but beyond that, there's also a lot of beautiful, heat-tolerant options.
3. Don't Use Turf
Grass turf requires maintenance, and if you create a roadway landscape design that doesn't include grass, you will immediately save time. Instead, opt for ground cover such such as wood chips, rubber mulch or even gravel.
4. Stop Weeds Before They Start
Weeding also takes up a lot of time, so you want to try to eliminate the weeds before they start growing. Ideally, you should place a layer of landscaping fabric beneath your design. That prevents germinating weed seeds from poking their sprouts up into your landscaping. You can also treat the ground with certain herbicides before putting in the rest of the landscaping.
5. Explore Hardscapes
You may also want to explore hardscapes or rock gardens. You can position rocks and gravel of all different sizes into the areas alongside the road and in the median. This creates beauty and visual texture, but it hardly requires any maintenance, other than spraying the rocks for weeds as needed.
6. Use Small Trees
If you decide to integrate trees into your design, choose small trees. They don't take as long to prune, and you can often reach them without special equipment. As an added bonus, you don't have to worry about big branches falling on traffic during storms or about picking up fallen branches after a storm.
