How To Tame An Unmanageable Garden
When your garden becomes an anxiety ridden mess in your backyard instead of the peaceful outdoor living room of your dreams, what do you do?
Visions of Beauty
In 2001 my husband and I bought our first starter home together. It was a small previously rented 1930's home with an old barn in the back and a lot of empty space around the house. It was a gardener's dream. At least, I thought it was. I had visions of beautiful flower beds followed by room after room of outdoor living space to while away my time dreaming of the next painting that I would be working on.
I went promptly to work creating my vision of a beautiful garden and I was quite content, combining my day job, with creating my art and in every other spare moment working on my garden. We even got a kitten, because every garden needs a cat.
Then, I had my first baby girl. The garden took sidestage as I focused on being a mother and sustaining my artistic career. That first year of motherhood was also my first solo show in a gallery. Luckily, my baby girl took long morning naps, which is when I painted, but the garden was a distant to do.
I then had my second baby girl. I continued to make art and dream of sustaining a well tended beautiful garden, but the garden was mostly neglected and my vision of beauty became a stressball of neglect. My girls are now teenagers and I just now feel like I am learning to balance motherhood, art and garden. Along the way I have discovered some hacks to tame the beast of my garden.
A List of tactics to simplify your garden upkeep
-
Power tools are your number one helpers. Lesson learned by watching my neighbor's landscaper. Using a weed eater, a hedge trimmer and a blower can greatly speed up your tiding up chores. I spent many hours meticulously pulling every tiny weed in my yard but when you are just trying to tame your garden, a quick cleanup by trimming back over growing shrubs and grass can make your garden look much more tidy much more quickly. I have become very adept at weed eating unwanted crab grass. When my swaths of poppy flowers are all dried up, I use the hedge trimmer to quickly wack it all down, instead of pulling each one out by hand. And after everything has been wacked away or mowed down I use the blower to blow all the bits and pieces into a managable pile. - Keep pathways clean and clear and it doesn't matter so much if the beds are messy. My husband would plead with me to cut back overgrowing plants that would ubstruct his way from the house to the barn. What should be an easy walk becomes a par core course down an over grown pathway. He's right not having clear pathways and walkways makes it hard to manoeuver around your garden, making the garden seem less approachable.
- Water what you want to grow and not what you don't want to grow. Check your system on a regular basis, watering the sidewalk and pathways just leads to more things growing in them that you have to clean up. As annuals grow from tiny to overgrown, and spring growth turns to summer masses, watering needs to be adjusted, especially if you are using a drip system. That sprayer that caught all your small plants may only now be watering the one overgrown plant that is in front of it.
- Mulch as much as you can. Cover up that potentially weed filled space with a thick layer of mulch. I couldn't always afford a thick layer of mulch throughout my whole garden at all times, so I sometimes resorted to straw, cardboard and even black plastic, which I have used over my vegetable boxes at times. The less open bare space the better. I have learned that it is ok to cover up and tuck away the vegetable garden for a season or two. It's quite ok to let the ground rest instead of desperately trying to keep up with weeding and watering the veggies, only to find that your bounty is pour because you neglected your growing edibles when they needed you most. Save some time, some water and some sanity by going to your local growers market for a season or two. If you have structured vegetable beds in place that are neatly covered up, they will stay there, until you can get back to them.
