Landscaping Ideas for Rental Houses

Whether you’re a landlord or a renter, you may want to keep the yard of your rental home looking nice by planting flowers, vegetables, ground covers and other easy-care plants. For landlords, the key to keeping the yard of a rental house looking good is growing plants that require very little care and maintenance. For tenants, growing plants in containers means not having to leave them behind when you move.

Whether you’re a landlord or a renter, improve the appearance of your yard by growing plants well-suited to your region. Visit a good local nursery to find plants that grow with ease. Decide if you want annuals, which live just a single season, long-lived perennials that stick around for years, or a combination of the two. Some fruit trees are fairly easy to grow as well. If you’re the landlord, you’ll only need to visit your property to prune, fertilize and harvest your trees two or three times a year. If you’re the tenant and you enjoy the fruit, a producing fruit tree is a bonus -- assuming your landlord doesn’t want the crop.

If you’re a renter and you like to garden, you can grow many types of plants in attractive planter boxes and decorative pots to dress up your front or back yard. Roses (Rosa spp.), with varieties hardy from U.S. Department of Agriculture plant hardiness zones 2 through 11, flowering bulbs, many herbs and even small trees and shrubs lend themselves well to container growing. You can move them to a new home if you leave your rental house. Perhaps you would like to grow some of the native plants from your part of the country. Many natives provide color, tolerate drought and rarely need fertilizer or other special care.

Grass lawns require constant maintenance with mowing, weeding, fertilizing and watering. If you’re a landlord and don’t relish the idea of paying for a yard service, you can’t always rely on tenants to keep a lawn looking its best. However, you need not abandon the idea of a lush green carpet. Many lawn alternatives exist, from Corsican mint (Mentha requienii), hardy in USDA zones 6 through 9, to creeping thyme (Thymus serpyllum), hardy in USDA zones 4 through 8. White clover (Trifolium repens), hardy in USDA zones 4 through 9, makes a beautiful, pollinator-friendly lawn alternative. Ground covers that withstand dry weather, frost and intense sun reduce lawn care.

Renters can enjoy the beauty of a flower garden and the nourishment of fresh vegetables when they plant annual varieties. Creating a small flower or vegetable garden is easy and inexpensive. When you move, you won’t be leaving behind a large investment of plants and soil amendments. With one 5-cubic-foot bag of organic compost, you can create a small garden bed by digging it into a space about 3 feet wide by 6 feet long. Spread the compost 3 inches deep on top of the soil and dig it in with a shovel. Then plant starter plants of flowers and veggies, water them once a week and enjoy the harvest later in the summer.