You can have it all, but not at the same time.
Cracked windows, Oprah and 7 ways to make your garden feel less overwhelming
I write this to you from an unmade bed, running off my daily allocated caffeine dose of one moderately strong tea, with hair that is a week past washing (over the last two years I have trained my hair follicles to respond very well to neglect and can now wash and do my hair only on the weekend and it lasts all week! Is that gross? I don’t know. I call it efficient).
Outside, my husband and toddler are playing on a swing we have hung from our pecan tree. The roses are blooming, the Miscanthus grass heads are cautiously popping into golden, feathery blooms, the vincas and marigolds are showing off, all magenta and burnt umber, and the very first broad bean and pea seedlings have poked their heads out of the soil. All told, things are ticking along fairly well.
But also, two days ago I spent 1.5 hours asleep on the playroom mat.
And also, there is a perfectly round half circle crack in our bedroom window from a week ago, when I kicked off my fluffy, soft, totally benign BEDROOM SLIPPERS a little too vigorously in a moment of frustration, and they soared through the air and bounced off the glass, leaving me with an inconveniently expensive and embarrassing problem to solve.
And also, there are 91 days until June 16, the day when our second baby is due to arrive, only I bet you she rocks up a week early like her brother did, which means I am simultaneously growing increasingly sick of being pregnant and also struggling to work out how I’ll cram the work I have left to complete into the rapidly vanishing pocket of time that remains available to me to do it in.
And it is at this point - with my cracked window, my unmade bed and a head of hair that has begun to hold the static, frozen shape reminiscent of my son’s Duplo figurines - that I am reminded of a pearl of wisdom often misattributed to Oprah: you can have everything you want in life, just not all at once (apparently it was actually the feminist Betty Friedan who said it first).
I’ve moaned on here plenty already about life being too full, too busy, and yet somehow I still keep on filling up the hours in my day with things to do. It seems like we all do. Maybe because so many of the things sound so enticing and fun. Probably, most of the things we say ‘yes’ to are wonderful, life enhancing exploits. It’s just there are too many of them. We can’t do them all, all at once, and we certainly can’t do them all and also have a pretty, well-maintained garden at the same time. Something’s gotta give.
And usually, unless you have decided to craft an entire career and online persona around your garden exploits, it’s the garden that gives first. You step outside, see the withered tomato bushes, the sandy, barren soil, the bags of mulch you haven’t spread and the seedlings you never planted (their sad little skeletons whimper at you from their puny, dried out containers). And you feel like a failure. This is why people don’t like gardening, or worse, why they never bother with a garden in the first place. In lives that are already overwhelming, where we somehow always feel guilty and like we could be doing better, could be doing more, the garden is just one more assault to our wellbeing. A reminder that we haven’t got our shit together.
Well not today, my weary friends.
Today I want to offer you seven ways to simplify your garden and make it less overwhelming. Because the truth is, if you can grow a garden that doesn’t exhaust you, make you feel guilty or generally piss you off in the most busy and stressful phases of your life, you may very well find that gardening is one of the best antidotes to all your other stressors.
Maybe you can’t have it all, all at the same time, but I really don’t see why you can’t have a reasonably beautiful garden throughout most seasons of your life. The trick is in the tactics. You need to do it the easy way, the lazy way, the not-constantly-overwhelming way. Here’s how:
Seven ways to beat your garden overwhelm
Add trees first
I come across a lot of people starting gardens who think they have to have it all sussed out from the get-go. They think they need a final layout, a perfect planting scheme, or that they need to be growing an abundance of food in raised beds. They aspire to be garden overachievers from the very beginning, but nine times out of ten they are starting on the back foot, with a totally empty yard/ a garden that is fully paved/nothing but dead lawn/bordered by Colourbond fencing or is, in some other way, antithetical to life.
It’s way too hard and overwhelming to try to plant a whole garden from that starting point. Don’t do it! Instead, just plant trees.
If your garden is full of sun and nothing else, the very best thing you can do is get some Retic in and plant trees. Autumn is the perfect time to get trees in, and if you are overwhelmed by your garden, know that you can ONLY add trees for years and you will still be making a huge difference to your garden. Trees will make your garden feel lush, secluded and private. They will start to cool the space, which means that when you eventually want to improve the soil and get other plants in, you’ll have an easier time of things.
If all you do is plant trees, you don’t have to embark on a wholesale soil improvement mission in every corner of your garden; you can just improve the soil where your trees are. And if life is busy, the trees you add now will continue to grow and fill out your garden with next to no maintenance.
If you have young kids and an empty yard, you can 100% just bung in a bunch of fruit trees, or natives, or ornamentals, and by the time your kids are in school and you have a moment to draw breath, your garden will be all set up and ready for the next layers of plants. If you are overwhelmed, don’t try to grow a garden (at least, not yet). Just grow some trees.
Simplify your soil improvement
Perth soil sucks and if you want to grow anything apart from local native plants, it will need improving. But the worst way to improve your soil is little by little, halfheartedly, every time you want to garden. It’s depressing, it doesn’t work, and it hangs over you like a storm cloud.
It is MUCH better, for your garden and your mindset, to decide to focus on your soil for just one day a season, and blitz the whole thing. Actually I tell a lie. You have two options. The first option is to blitz your soil once a season, adding clay, manure and mulch to the whole thing, and then just not think about it for another three months.
If you’re looking for help with soil improvement, I explain exactly how I improve my soil, what I add, and when, in my new e-book, From Sand to Soil: A Perth Gardener’s Guide (which you can buy here).
But if blitzing your whole garden feels overwhelming, the second option is to do what I do now that I have a toddler occupying large chunks of my time. These days I order a tonne of bags of the soil amendments I use, get them delivered in one go, then plop a bag of each next to every bed. It won’t look as pretty because you’ll have a bunch of bags of manure lying around. But it means that every time you decide you want to plant a bed, you can improve just that one bed with the bags that are already lying right beside it. Tackling the job one bite at a time.
Either option will work, but what you don’t want to do is waste your time with shonky products - bags of cheap ‘soil improver’, blood and bone (which adds nutrients but does nothing to improve your soil structure), soil wetters or liquid feeds that require frequent applications and don’t make a whole lot of difference.
Actually, the very worst thing to do, and the way to make your garden truly overwhelming, is to not really address your soil at all. If you don’t bother to add anything to your soil to make it healthy, nearly everything you grow will feel like an exhausting, uphill battle. Put effort into your soil, in whatever way works for you, and the rest of the time you spend in the garden will feel much easier and more pleasurable.
Grow perennials
If your garden experience is feeling overwhelming, ditch annual plants entirely (these are the plants you typically grow from seed or add as seedlings - they last a season then die and need replacing). Grow perennials instead.
Perennials last at least two years (but most last much longer). They don’t need constant replacing and they tend to be tougher. For an ornamental garden, think things like passionfruit marigolds, wormwood, Peruvian lilies, canna lilies, Chinese lanterns, oyster plants, buddlejas, roses, perennial grasses, salvias and bulbs. For edible plants try artichokes, fruit trees, chillies, Jerusalem artichokes, sweet potatoes, passionfruit vines and blueberries (in pots). Get these going after you’ve got your trees in - you can enjoy a garden with flowers and edible plants to harvest, without the constant upkeep of a traditional veggie patch or flower garden.
Abandon pest control
I have ranted so many times about pests already that today I will give you only the shortest version: the easiest, best, most long-term solution to almost all of your pest worries is do nothing.
Most bug issues resolve once you have a garden with many diverse plantings and a wide and varied insect ecosystem, and you’ll lose money and slow down that ecosystem from developing if you waste your time trying to control the insects in your patch. The thing you want is a LOT of different bugs - together they will keep each other in check. Achieve this by growing as many different plants as you can, ideally with pollen-rich flowers, and ditch the poisons and sprays.
Not only is it a more effective way to garden, it is infinitely more enjoyable than focusing on nibbled leaves and looking for tiny little garden enemies to wage war with every time you head outside. Our moods are hugely influenced by what we choose to focus on. Don’t waste your precious time in the garden by choosing to focus on minuscule insects or the minuscule holes they nibble in your plants.
Only sow seeds that grow easily
If you do want to grow annuals, focus on those that self seed (Fennel! Basil! Lettuce! Tomatoes! Mustard greens! Pincushion flowers!) OR those that can be easily planted by smushing their (usually big) seeds straight into your garden beds (broad beans, sweet peas, sweetcorn, peas, beetroot, snake beans).
Don’t bother with seed raising punnets if you’re already overwhelmed. Too much, too fussy, no need! You can grow the needy little seeds when life is calmer, whenever that may be. For now, know that you can grow a garden filled with plenty of interesting, tough flowers and edibles, without all that much mollycoddling.
Don’t plan your plant layout
These days everyone seems to feel pressured to have some sort of formal garden ‘plan’. Sometimes I do too! But then I remember that not once, ever, have I ever adhered to any kind of gardening plan. And then I remember that I move my plants around all the time. And that doing that is actually heaps of fun. And that half the time the unplanned parts of my garden are the spots that end up most beautiful.
Don’t stress over getting everything in the ‘right’ place. Aim, roughly, to have the big, tall plants at the back of your garden beds, plant a lot of perennials (and chuck random seeds for annuals like poppies, cornflowers and cosmos into any remaining gaps), and grow your veggies in little clumps (a clump of lettuces here, a bunch of carrots there - this method, called ‘mixed poly culture’, actually tends to work better for bug control, anyway).
Just remember that if you don’t like something, you can usually move it. And if it dies, oh well, sometimes plants die. Better a few dead plants and a gardener who actually has fun out there than a bunch of living plants grown by someone who is too scared to move any of them.
Allow yourself to enjoy it
On that note, my last piece of advice to beat your garden overwhelm is so simple it may seem obvious, but, at some point or other, almost all of us forget to actually do it:
Allow yourself to enjoy your garden.
It’s so easy to get caught up in the trap of thinking your garden needs to be a certain way, look a certain way, feed you a certain amount of fresh vegetables, whatever. This is partly because of people like me who throw garden advice at you every week, making you feel like you need to have your sweet peas sown, your roses pruned, your soil mulched, your spring bulbs ordered and whatever else it might be. And if you haven’t done all those things IT’S ALREADY TOO LATE AND YOU’RE A DICKHEAD.
None of that matters. Life is long, and in any given year you absolutely do not need to grow everything, pick everything, prune everything, plant everything.
If all you do this year is plant a pot of daffodils and watch it grow, and if - in spring- that pot of daffodils sits on a little table, sprouting in the sunshine, and if you spend just five minutes each day siting next to it, drinking your coffee and watching the bulbs burst into bloom, if you spy a single bee darting into the centre of each flower, leaving moments later covered in pollen, if it makes you smile, believe me: that is plenty. That is wonderful. That is enough.
Thank you for reading! See you next time for more Lo fi life!
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Thanks you are my new favorite garden writer 🍀
Oh my goodness I so needed to read this at the moment 😅 thank you ☺️