SOME days there's just not enough time to get everything done let alone keep everyone happy and on those days the garden takes last place on the to-do list.
To help anyone else who has my sort of time crunch, here are a few of my tips and tricks designed for the out-of-time gardener.
Tip 1: Weeding has to be the least enjoyable and most time consuming task in garden maintenance. To avoid weeding I keep all of the soil in the garden mulched year-round. I even mulch my containers to avoid having to weed them which also help to prevent drought stress. I use wood chips for mulching which I obtain from my friendly neighbourhood arborist.
When wood chips are unavailable, I use leaves from my own trees or those found during fall in the nearby city park. The trick is to make sure that every last inch of earth is covered with a thick layer of mulch so weed seeds cannot germinate.
Tip 2: Lawn cutting for some people is a form of therapy. For me lawn cutting is work. So I have eliminated the time most people spend cutting lawn down to zero. How? I killed all of the lawn in the front yard and installed planting beds interwoven with a bluestone patio and walkway. In the backyard, there's a small patch of lawn that I refuse to cut, so my wife cuts it. The trick is to change the design of the garden to a less labour intensive style and if that does not work, then delegate.
Tip 3: I like growing veggies but much of my garden is dedicated to hardy ornamentals, so I grow veggies in containers. Veggies grown in pots take half the time to plant and maintain because there are no veggie planting beds to maintain. I can also change my veggie selections each year and move them around the yard as desired. Yes I do need to obtain or grow new soil for my veggie pots each year but that is what compost piles are for. When planting veggies in pots, bigger and deeper pots are best to provide a deep, cool root run. A pot the size of a washing machine is ideal but hard to find. Try upcycling or repurposing a pot from some other sort of container. One tip for planting pots, do not add shreds of foam, broken pots or any other manner of shrapnel to the bottom of the pot for drainage. Adding shrapnel to the bottom of the pot is a myth and those pieces simply perch the water table higher and deny plants the full depth of soil.
Tip 4: Solving pest or disease problems can be difficult, time consuming and often the problem persists from year to year. Some plants are important and worth fighting for, some are not. To avoid pest and disease problems I use the following pest and disease strategies: Firstly, avoid the use of chemical fertilizer because it forces soft lush growth that predisposes plant to pest and disease attack.
Secondly, choose the right plant for the right place, not the right plant for the place I want it to grow. Thirdly, plants that have a chronic pest and disease problem are ruthlessly ripped out and thrown into the compost or green waste bin. A case in point, I recently found that thrips were overwintering on my hellebores. Thrips are tough, persistent and cannot be killed in one year by any means. So I dug out all of my hellebores and tossed them in the green waste bin. The tip: a good gardener knows how to kill plants as well as he or she grows plants.
Tip 5: I love new plants and I like seeing the latest breeding improvements growing in my garden. But I have no time and little patience for prima donnas. Just because a plant is new means nothing to me. The latest improvement in some flavour-of-the-month plant is often not worth having.
I like my big old hosta that grows like a weed and does not get eaten by slugs unlike some of the new slug caviar hostas on the market. New is not always better, improved is not always improved. I like to watch other people flounder in the oblivion of "I must have the latest new plant" hell before I will try it. It's a great spectator sport for gardeners.
The last time-saving tip in the garden is the most important for me and many other people I have spoken to. It is: grow plants that move you visually, spiritually, edibly or in some other sensory way and don't worry about what everyone else is growing.
Todd Major is a journeyman horticulturist and chief horticulture instructor at the UBC Botanical Garden. For advice contact him at stmajor@ shaw.ca
