…and still have a pretty garden

 With a busy household and jobs, we are sometimes just too busy to get into the garden.  If you acquire a second career in retirement or set out for traveling adventure.  You still miss your garden and want to enjoy it when you can.

Here are some tips!

Can this even be called gardening?

Maybe you’re a lazy gardener like me,….I don’t judge, but will let you know my tips for taking quick care of your garden during busy times.

Deadhead spent blooms

In mid to late summer, pick on area after the other and trim all the spent blooms down to 6-8 inches.
The cooler weather and Fall rains will allow your perennials and shrubs to get a s bushy as they can. Just grab a handful of stems and cut straight across. For lavender, I make the plants as mounded as possible.

or a Spanish lavender, I would cut off four inches down to a nice mound

Trimming perennials

Wear gloves to prevent small cuts and sticks

Trim rhododendrons to make the shrub nice and bushy

Let some of your plants go to seed

Some plants you know to be good reseeders can be left to form seedpods.  This is a very simple way to ‘wintersow’…leave them all year without trimming.  If you have a whole bed of the same flower, trim around the outside, like I did with my Columbine path and leave the taller seed forming stems as they are.

Jerusalem Sage will reseed if you leave some pods

Jupiter’s beard is a good reseeder and nondescript so I leave the seedheads

Common coreopsis seedheads

Water less often, but deeply

Set your watering system for every other day and for twice as long, up to an hour! I have my drip system set for every day, 20 minutes and the drippers give out 1 gallon an hour.  For twenty minutes, that gives each area only one third of a gallon a day.

If you hand water, it can be quite a job, moving a hose from place to place. Remove the nozzle and set the hose to flood a garden bed. Just walk away and set a timer to remind you to move it.  You’ll need to water less often and especially in summer, your plants will benefit from the soaking.

Garden hoses are heavy to haul around.  Do it less often…

A sprinkler in the ‘rain garden’ which needs a bit of extra water in summer

Deep watering is better for plants—it encourages their roots to grow down deep instead of moistening just the top inch. It also saves water, and you want your plants to be deep-rooted.

You can do this with sprinklers, too, like I do in my rock garden only once a month or so.

Mulch, instead of weed

After ten or twelve years of adding pine mulch to my garden beds, I can tell you that weeding is a dream, now.  Cover the bare ground with two inches of mulch and weeds will have a tough time sprouting.

Mulch will retain moisture through the hot summer

Each Spring when I go around weeding,…I turn the old mulch into the soil and finish each one by adding more.
In subsequent years, any weeds are easier to pull out because the soil isn’t as hard. It becomes nice and loose and what Martha Stewart calls ‘friable.’

The Asplund truck makes the mulch pile look small It’s four feet high and wide.  Free!

I’ve been lucky enough to get free mulch from logging and tree trimmers, but if you have to buy mulch, wait for a sale to buy it in bulk.

Rake your paths

You’ll be amazed at how satisfying it is to simply rake your epaths.  It’s good, quick exercise and neatens the garden like no other chore.  I enjoy it, raking all the leaves and twigs and stones into the garden beds.

After a rain is a good time to rake paths

A lovely raked path,…makes your heart go pitter-pat…

I hope you enjoy being ‘lazy’ in the garden….you know I do!