Breathing New Life into Your Backyard Zen Garden Elements

Adding Zen elements to your backyard garden can make for some very exciting times, with the likes of fish ponds, water features, and miniature cascading fountains adding loads of natural ambience and beauty to any garden. Often though, any water-based garden features take quite a bit of work to maintain, especially if your aim is to have them fitting in naturally with all the other elements of your garden.

Testimony to this being a serious commitment is how what might have once been a fish-pond serving as nothing more than just a regular pond, perhaps nursing some water-lilies whose sub-surface growth makes for a tadpole refuge. It only takes one or two hectic months for something like that sorry sight to be compounded by the kind of overgrowth that proves much more difficult to combat once it has taken proper hold of your once-beautiful Zen garden features. It’s true that several oxygenating pond plants can add quite a bit of zen to water elements, not to mention the much-needed oxygen they bring, literally breathing life into the pond; it’s equally true that to retain their freshness and appealing qualities, they need to be maintained regularly.

Cleaning and trimming

Breathing new life into your backyard Zen garden elements starts with simply doing some cleaning and trimming, and in some instances that’s all you’d really need. It always makes for a markedly improved sight just being able to actually walk up to something like the banks of your backyard pond and dip your hand in without being poked in the eye by some long grass.

Use your pool net to remove some of the leaves and debris – and I say “some” because often a natural amount of debris can keep your garden’s Zen elements looking, well, naturally beautiful. Adding some teak garden furniture will also give you some seating to enjoy the garden from.

Keep in mind that it’s much easier to keep things trimmed by regularly pruning and uprooting weeds than to try and tackle the type of overgrowth that has had quite a bit of time to establish itself and take over.

Discouraging overgrowth

Prevention is always better than cure, so applies the cliché that holds true in pretty much all areas of life. Take active steps to discourage overgrowth by perhaps lining key areas of the garden with something like some teak garden furniture pieces. The best way to discourage overgrowth is by placing those plants that love water nearer the water feature, which will very soon take up more of the space without looking like they’ve been given some steroids!

Discouraging invasive plant growth

Both overgrowth and invasive plant growth can be discouraged further through the likes of regular weeding and ensuring you pull out the invasive plants at the root. Consolidate by using something like used cooking oil to douse invasive plants and that soil on which you want to create a barrier to possible overgrowth.

Make it a habit to pull out weeds for instance, every time you get up from the latest session chilling on your teak wood garden bench, beside your pond or other water features. Also find time to clean leaves using a leaf blower. There are a number of these in the market similar to Toro 51619 Ultra Blower. Pick one and clean your yard; leaf blowers can come to your aid on mulch as well.

Encouraging exploration and interaction

Garden furniture suppliers who offer bespoke design services should be contacted about the possibility of building you something like a little wooden bridge on which people can cross over a particularly narrow section of your water feature, just so that all the water features are made more accessible. The classic fish to add to your water feature would be koi, you can buy koi food here. This kind of accessibility breeds the type of regular interaction that will help you keep your Zen elements alive and in good shape.