If a business owner wishes to cut down on their business landscape maintenance and manage their carbon footprint, the most impactful step to take is saving water. By saving water on your business landscaping needs, you’re not only cutting down on the resources a beautiful landscape will require but also the work that needs to be put in to maintain it. This allows you more time enjoying your landscape and less time worrying about its upkeep. There are several different ways businesses can lower their business landscape maintenance by saving water, and all it takes is some careful planning about types of plants go into your landscape in the first place.
Use Native Plants
One of the best ways to save water and lower your need for business landscape maintenance is by using plants native to the South Carolina region. Native plants have evolved to adapt to the natural regional environment already and their needs already adjust to go along with what the area seasons have to offer. They’ve grown to need water most when the natural environment will provide it, store water during dry seasons, and protect themselves from heat, cold or storms, so Mother Nature can do much of your business landscape maintenance for you. Many different varieties of shrubs, trees, flowers, and ground cover plants are native to the area, so you still have a great deal of variety in terms of designing and executing your business landscape naturally in a native way.
Group Your Plants According To Their Maintenance And Water Needs
If using all native plants isn’t in your design plan, you can still save on water and lower your business landscape maintenance needs. A business owner can take a look at the type of water and care their chosen plants will need and arrange them to grow and thrive in the same areas of the landscape as one another. What this does is saves you from needing to consider irrigation and water spread across your entire landscape to accommodate certain plants, and any extra water and care needs can be limited to certain areas only.
Another benefit of grouping plants in this way is that you’ll be able to provide better individualized care for the plants. For example, placing a plant with high water needs next to a plant with lower water needs causes you to run the risk of providing too much or too little water to effectively care for all of the plants in a specific area. This could lead to you losing plants and therefore some of your landscaping investment.
Don’t Focus On Grass For Groundcover
For groundcover, the grass is the first thing that comes to many business owners’ minds. The grass is simple, it looks attractive, it seems easy enough to care for, but it also takes quite a bit of water to keep fresh. There is a reason why you see a lot of grass turning brown and dying in the heat of the summer in South Carolina; it hasn’t been regularly watered and maintained throughout the hotter months. Grass requires regular water, but not too much water, and having grass as the main groundcover option for your business landscape can make upkeep rather complicated.
This is not to say business owners shouldn’t incorporate any grass, and alternating smaller grass patches with other groundcover options like Carolina Jessamine, mulch, or shrubs is an excellent alternative. Using less grass and bringing in more native groundcover plants and shrubs also brings an interesting and different type of textural look to your landscape design, allowing the eye to travel naturally along the landscape and to all the different types of plants it offers.
Grasses will typically require a bit more upkeep than different native groundcover options, and if you’re looking to lower business landscape maintenance by way of saving water, it is a great place to start.
Saving water on your business landscape helps you in two ways – it helps limit your carbon footprint to create a more sustainable environment, and saves money on upkeep costs. Alongside your business landscaping design professionals, investigating how you could cut your water needs while still getting the beautiful business landscape design you want is a worthwhile endeavor for any South Carolina business to consider. What you receive is a beautiful design that is friendly to you, your business, and your environment.
