Your home may have a luscious green yard, flower beds galore, and beautiful trees. It’s a dream come true — until you realize you’ve got a seemingly endless list of yard maintenance to-dos piling up. Mowing the lawn, pulling weeds, replacing mulch, and maintaining flower beds aren’t easy jobs. But they’re necessary tasks in order to create and maintain a yard you can be proud of.
Whether you love working with your hands outside or would rather do anything else, it must be done to maintain your investment. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be as difficult as it may appear. Here are a few ways to make completing your yard work chores easier and more enjoyable.
1. Invest in Durable, Protective Clothing
Yard work can entail being outside for anywhere from a few minutes to hours on end. That is long periods in direct sunlight, facing the elements of the great outdoors. It also involves tangling with branches, prickly weeds, and long grass. You’ll need the right protective clothing to avoid scratches, scrapes, and bug bites and get the job done safely.
When you’re working outside during the day, sun protection is a must. Wearing sunscreen in addition to a sun hat and both long sleeves and pants is a great idea. Remember that footwear is key, too. A good pair of boots or comfortable sneakers can both save your feet and prevent unwanted critter encounters as you complete yard chores.
If mowing and gardening are in your future for the long haul, it’s worth investing in sturdy protective clothing. Fortunately, you don’t have to spend a bunch of money to get a great product that will last. Look to snag some discount Carhartt work pants among the factory seconds, for example. When you’re mowing, a few cosmetic imperfections won’t yield any less protection from flying pebbles and acorns. They’ll last for years to come and keep you safe and comfortable as you tackle your yard work tasks.
2. Know Your Equipment
A shiny new tool for your yard work is an exciting purchase. You get to mow, edge, or leaf-blow to your heart’s content. But new equipment can make your yard work more challenging if you don’t actually know how it works. Avoid wasted time later by taking the time upfront to read the instruction manual thoroughly.
From the required battery charging time or the different settings available, knowing details about your tools is crucial. It helps ensure you stay safe as you operate powerful machinery, and it ups your efficiency to boot. Who knows? You may even discover powerful, time-saving features you didn’t even know existed.
Plus, once you’re in the know of how your tool is supposed to work, it’s easier to notice when something’s wrong. Not only will this ensure safe operation, but it may enable you to get repairs done when the warranty is still active. That means you won’t be left footing the bill for the repair work, thus saving you money. How can you not love that?
3. Create a Schedule
There’s no doubt that facing an entire yard’s worth of maintenance work can be daunting. So do yourself a favor and devise a plan for your outdoor chores. You might schedule certain jobs weekly, like mowing, whereas weeding can be done every two weeks. Some chores, like pruning or mulching planting beds, may only need to be tackled once or twice a season.
While it may seem like extra work to plan your yard work in advance, it ensures everything gets done in a timely manner. Instead of staring out into a yard full of weeds and overgrown grass, your schedule helps you keep things under control. The natural world can run rampant, but not when you chip away at outdoor maintenance tasks one at a time. Your future self and your lawn will thank you for it.
While you’re scheduling yard work, consider time of day as well. As a general rule of thumb, most places experience their hottest temps and highest UV index in the mid-afternoon. That makes doing nearly anything from 1 to 3 p.m. more physically taxing — and a potential heatstroke risk. Therefore, aim to get an early start on your mowing and weeding, or save it for when until the sun begins to set.
4. Enlist Help
For some, ambitious, large-scale yard projects are an exciting challenge. There’s the initial planning and then the buying of plants and landscape materials required to ensure you succeed. And then the real fun starts when you begin executing your plan and bringing your vision to life.
But sometimes, a project grows into much more than planned, meaning you need help. That’s OK! Outdoor projects often require strenuous physical labor on top of the mental labor that planning requires. So don’t fret if you feel overwhelmed or like you can’t do it alone.
Whether you ask family members to pitch in or hire professionals, enlisting the help of others will only amplify your efforts. What that looks like is entirely up to you, too. Maybe you hire a helper one day a month, or that person’s by your side every Saturday. However you arrange them, the tasks at hand will be easier when more people are involved.
Leveled-Up Yard
Love it or hate it, yard work has to be done. Luckily, it doesn’t have to be overly difficult. Put a few of these strategies to work, and you’ll end up with a green space you can be proud of. You may even find yourself looking forward to breaking out the rake and the trowel more often.