Falling apart
When you just can’t keep up with all those Joneses
Ok so the title of this newsletter is probably too drastic. Let me start off by saying that I’M not falling apart. At least, I don’t think I am??? And really neither is the garden.
There’s just a lot going on! It’s summer - almost. We have a terrific, teething, tumultuous almost-2-year old tearing around the place. We are - blessedly, thankfully, exhaustedly - nearing the end of a 6+ month DIY kitchen/bathroom renovation. We have a garlic harvest coming up and… I have never spent so little time in the garden.
I recently watched
’s thanksgiving special. She’s one of my favourite writers/chefs/recipe creators, and I tend to peer in at her life via Instagram and Substack as a Charles Dickens street urchin might wistfully peer through a frosted shop window at all the beautiful wares for sale. She’s just so damn cool. Her food is beautiful yet unpretentious, her dinners are candlelit, her cookbooks are, well, I wish I’d written them. She drinks wines I’ve never heard of. I like her clothes. And this year, for Thanksgiving she is pregnant, and a little bit tired. Aren’t we all.This year, for Thanksgiving,
is doing less.
There was something about seeing someone I so admire deciding to actively do a little less (and celebrating that fact!), that I found insanely refreshing. Yes, she still whipped up an impressive multi-course meal, she still served two kinds of cranberry sauces and roasted a whole turkey. But I think this may have been the first time I’ve actually seen someone with a truly big profile, who does a whole heap of stuff, standing in front of the camera and admitting that they need to turn the treadmill down a few notches. For that, I salute her.
Notes:
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It’s a list of ways to grow a garden that can withstand a little neglect when life gets too hectic - workarounds to keep it fun and satisfying, even if you have little kids, a stressful job, or just a lot going on.
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It’s funny isn’t it, because I think sometimes we want these people, these people who have become idealised characters in our minds, to achieve the impossible. To host elaborate dinner parties right up until they give birth, to run marathons at 38 weeks pregnant, to ‘bounce back’, to ‘push forward’, to churn out endless content, ceaselessly showing us a version of life that somehow remains sparky and effervescent and full of energy in every season. We sort of want the fairytale, but it also sort of makes us feel like shit. Because if they can do it, surely, so can we. So must we. We should just try harder. We should just work harder.
So the people we look up to are pressured to push on relentlessly, burning themselves out in efforts to keep the fantasy alive. And we, watching them from other side of the screen, attempt to keep pace, trying just as hard to realise the fantasy at our end. And we all end up tired and feeling like we’ve failed.
Not enough people admit that what they want most is to cancel their Thanksgiving dinners. Not enough people say, with confidence, ‘this year, I’m doing less’. Well
, you’ve thrown down the gauntlet, and I think it’s time we all take note.So, this November in the spirit of realness, here’s an unvarnished look at my garden right now. Because the truth is, whether you’re a chef, or an artist, or a writer, or a parent, or a rock climber, or a gardener, you don’t HAVE to be perfect and constantly ‘kicking goals’ in order to feel genuine love and passion for the thing that you’re doing. You can do less, without loving it any less. In fact, once you take some of the pressure off, you might love it a little bit more.
What’s more, if we all stop trying to craft ourselves perfect (unattainable) lives, we’ll have time to focus on the goals that are actually realistic, the ones that actually move the needle. Alison Roman’s pumpkin pie uses tinned pumpkin. Does she think it would be better if she spent hours roasting and puréeing her own pumpkin? No she does not. It’s just not worth the effort. We have finite time and energy in this world and we may as well direct both of those resources to the things that count. So read on for a realistic tour of my garden, followed by my top recommendations for how you, too, can ✨achieve more with less✨ in your garden next year and forever more.
Because maybe things really will calm down once Christmas is over and we’ll all be able to get our lives in order and start 2025 ahead of the game, relaxed, in control, making waves, getting lit. Probably, though, we’ll be on the couch, sweating out a few kgs of roast potato, and parenting with one eye open.
A realistic tour of our garden (in photos)
But here’s the thing… The trees and most of the plants are all still totally fine and - call me crazy, but I think things are, on balance, really still quite pretty
How to achieve more …with less
The above photos may all look very uninspiring to you. You may, even now, be finding yourself tempted to unsubscribe to this newsletter and head on over to Better Homes and Gardens, where you’ll find, no doubt, some substantially better homes and gardens. But let me say this! The main reason I’m not too stressed out about the state of our garden is it’s really not that bad. I swear.
Our garden is likeeee 80% fine, with maybe 20% room for improvement. And these days, with a toddler and life getting in the way, this is a grade I’m more than okay with. None of the mess is permanent - it could probably be fixed in one weekend. And the reason for this is that I’ve put my energy into the things that actually make the garden happy, healthy and pretty (if a little chaotic).
If I had bought a corrugated raised bed from Bunnings, filled it with soil and attempted to grow a food forest in it, I’d have failed abysmally. It would 100% all be dead right now, I guarantee it. Those sorts of gardens are incredibly hard to maintain when you have no time to care for them. Our garden can get a little ragged at the edges but there are still ALWAYS things to harvest and cook with, flowers to enjoy and pretty spots to sit. I want to help you grow a garden like that, because perfection is overrated. Here’s what works for me.
Plant trees
Our garden would have fallen apart multiple times if I hadn’t spent the last decade filling it with trees. Trees will stick by you through thick and thin, they will shade your garden, attract wildlife and provide you with food crops even when you ignore them for months and months. Once established they are fairly resilient in the face of summer heatwaves (although they still need irrigation), and, as they grow, they enable you to build microclimates into your garden - areas that are cooler, more moist, and easier to grow in. Plant trees. Plant a lot of them. Here’s a list of every tree growing in our garden to date to help you get started.
Plant perennial food crops
Traditional veggies are HIGH MAINTENANCE beasts. They need a lot of water, they grow fast, bear fruit, then keel over and die. Ironically, upsettingly, these are so often the first plants people try to grow. The ones that require maximum effort. There are so many edible plants you can grow that ask a lot less from you and give you produce you can cook with throughout the year. First, try trees with leaves you can eat. My favourites are curry leaf, kaffir lime and bay trees. These are brilliant culinary trees and you can use them to make curries, sauces, soups and so many great recipes 365 days of the year. Next, plant perennial herbs like lemongrass, ginger, turmeric, oregano, rosemary, marjoram and thyme (I want to say sage I REALLY want to say sage, but I can’t seem to grow sage without killing it). Grow long-lived greens like kale, Silverbeet and spinach, so you can whip up a salad from the garden whenever you like. Grow fruit trees like citrus, mulberries, bananas, papayas and apples - all will give you seasonal harvests you can cook with or preserve (or just chuck into the freezer to use later - bananas, cumquats, blueberries and mulberries are all great freezer fruits). Grow artichokes, Jerusalem artichokes, asparagus and chillies (chillies usually survive winter in Perth so you can get a few years out of them). Grow passionfruit and pecans. There are so (SO) many edible perennials, and getting even a few of them into your garden will make it so much easier to regularly enjoy homegrown food. Even if it’s just a few bay leaves or a fresh apple it’s a pretty incredible and satisfying thing to do.
Grow plants that self seed
The edible plants I grow that aren’t perennials fall into one of two categories - either they have big seeds that are easy to save and sow direct the following year (broad beans, snake beans, sweetcorn), or they self seed so easily around the garden all I have to do is shake them over the soil once I’ve ripped them out (fennel, mustard greens, parsley, lettuce, wild rocket and basil are a great place to start). Nurture these self sown seedlings whenever they pop up, I find they are often healthier and better than the ones I sow intentionally.
Plant perennial flowers
Like my veggies, most of my flowers are perennials. Echium, Peruvian lilies, buddlejas, brilliantasia ulugurica, NZ rock lilies, canna lilies, salvias, roses, clematis, New York asters. I could go on but I’ve already written an exhaustive guide to every flower I’m growing in our garden and when it blooms, so if you want a garden that flowers all year round, check that out. Like my veggies, the flowers I grow that aren’t perennial are ones that self seed easily (poppies, Californian poppies, cosmos, calendula, borage) or where the seeds are nice and big so I can collect them and sow them each year (sweet peas, sunflowers).
Grow tough plants
If a plant dies in our garden, under my not-very-watchful eye, I just won’t grow it again. This is the simplest way to ensure you have a garden filled with plants that grow well, and I feel like not enough people do it. I’ve killed a tonne of plants but my garden is filled with healthy plants because I just replicate what works and abandon what doesn’t. So many plants grow just fine in Perth, as long as you give them good soil and a bit of water. Screw hydrangeas, stuff azaleas, camellias and maple trees. They are meant for better and more diligent gardeners than I. And that is perfectly ok.
Chop and drop EVERYTHING ALL THE TIME
Don’t let organic matter leave your property unless it is diseased. Just fling it back onto your garden beds. This is a true ‘two birds one stone’ practice - you don’t have to bother composting or getting rid of your garden waste, and it will feed and protect your soil. I haven’t done this enough over the last few years and have relied too heavily on lupin mulch (which I love). But I think it’s gonna have to be my new approach for the foreseeable future. Pull out your spent plants, take your trimmings and cuttings and put them in a big pile on the lawn, then smash them to bits with the sharp blade of a spade (Careful! Toes!). Chuck them back into the garden and let them feed your soil. It’s not as pretty and neat as a nice lupin mulch, but it does fine in a pinch.
Get your water and soil in order as much as you possibly can
Of all the things that I’m neglecting in our garden, the soil is the only one that actually stresses me out. This is the one area where consistent neglect will come back to bite you. I SHOULD be adding clay, manure and mulch right now. 900 cubic litres of it. I’m going to be honest with you: it’s just not going to happen.
I’ve been trying to work out how I can care for the soil in more lazy, haphazard and negligent ways. I’m planning to experiment with just tossing clay around onto the top of the soil and adding bags of sheep or chicken manure instead of my regular DSATCO piggy post. Sheep and chicken manure is a bit stronger than the piggy post, and so can burn plants leaves, but i feel like it will go further than the (comparatively milder) piggy post. Mulching with 900 cubic litres of lupin mulch is just not on the cards this summer, so, as I just mentioned, I’m going to chop and drop everything I pull out of the garden, right back onto the surface of the soil. I might try sowing a green manure cover crop, but I suspect the soil will soon be too dry for a cover crop to work, so chop and drop is my current working plan and we’ll see how that goes. I’m not going to rip plants out to put new ones in, I’m going to just push seeds into empty gaps and see what pops up. My snake beans are going to grow up a frame that has the brown, crackling skeletons of spring’s sweet peas still clinging onto it.
And here’s the upshot: if this all works out complete fine, it will mean you really CAN do this. WE really can do this. We can grow gardens even when it’s hard, when we have no time, when things get a bit wild and overgrown. And we can find things to love about them all the way through. I think that’s something worth pushing for, and that is where I’ll be directing all future remaining energy.
That, and making Alison Roman’s pumpkin pie. And you can bet your holly jolly Christmas ass the pumpkin will be canned.
Thank you for reading! See you next time for more Lo fi life!
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