Looking for minimal-gardening solutions.

So, my mother is handicapped and I’m busy but neighbors have been pestering us about weeds growing. We have an enormous garden and neither of us has the energy to care for the garden as we should. I’m kinda just looking for ways to grow things that won’t piss off the neighbors and keep weeds down and work to a minimum. I used to have a sage bush which did a fairly good job but my grandmother (when she was still capable) disliked it because it grew too big and basically just dug it into the soil. Anyone got any ideas what I could plant? I kinda like the idea of a herb garden, but I’m not that picky as long as it keeps the neighbors off my back and won’t force me make gardening a daily feature in my life.

The location is central Germany, the soil is rather sandy and I’m literally in the neighborhood of a sandstone quarry that has (with interruptions) been used for the past 1000 years plus or minus a century. It’s all rather flat, temperatures tend to climb up to 35°C in the middle of summer but essentially never drop below -10°C during winter nights. It’s somewhat dryer than average for the country.