If you love spending time outside enjoying your garden, chances are you’ll put a lot of effort into maintaining it. Along with mowing the lawn, digging the borders and trimming the bushes, you’ll also need to care for your garden paving. Whether you’ve got a patio covered in seating and plants or a gorgeous garden path, it’s important to maintain it so that it looks as good as the rest of your garden!
Maintaining Patio Paving
I love sitting out on our patio. Our garden furniture is quite basic, but the patio paving makes the whole area look upmarket. To maintain our patio paving, we have to keep on top of any weeds sprouting. This means we’re regularly pulling weeds out on sight, as well as regularly spraying weedkiller. We have to be careful because we’ve got children, so we spray the weedkiller when we know the kids won’t be out there for a couple of days. If possible, avoid weed killers that contain glyphosate, such as RoundUp, which has been linked to cancer in some studies.
We also have a thick bristled outdoors brush that we use to sweep the patio paving. Dust and debris can gather on our paved area, especially after a downpour. We’ve found this makes it look a little scruffy, so we sweep it up and pop the fallen leaves etc in the garden bin.
Caring for garden stepping stones
Stepping stones are a different beast entirely. I grew up in a garden with stepping stones, and although they looked cute (and were loads of fun to play on), there was a fair bit of maintenance. You have to be careful the grass surrounding each stone doesn’t become overgrown and cover them. You also need to make sure the opposite doesn’t happen and the grass doesn’t wear away between the slabs. Trim your grass to keep the paving slabs exposed, and plant more grass seeds if you get any bald spots.
General tips
Try to avoid scratching the paving by scraping heavy objects over it. Instead, lift garden furniture and try to avoid parking any heavy equipment on the slabs temporarily.
Jet washing paving can take away any signs of ageing or dirt build up, so if your paving slabs are looking tired, this could be a good fix. If you’re going to do it yourself, take extra care – the pressure in those things is really high!
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