A well maintained and thriving garden is truly a thing of beauty. If you’ve ever watched a gardening show or picked up a garden magazine, no doubt you wished you had such a garden yourself. The truth is, you can. If you are willing to bust your ass to make it happen!
I found out the hard way that those gardening shows and magazines rarely mention just how much work a garden takes to look good throughout the growing season. Oh, they’ll tell you in passing that you need to weed on a regular basis (one of my favorite gardening quotes: a gardener’s shadow is the best fertilizer), but rarely do they bring up all the digging, and plant dividing and hoeing involved. Don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy getting outside and getting my hands dirty. What I am not a fan of is how much back and foot pain such work can engender.
Take the yearly garden clean up. I don’t recall any of the gardening articles I read when I first started gardening that mentioned just what a pain in the ass the spring clean up the garden is. With one exception: Paul James, former host of the TV show Gardening by the Yard, was pretty up front with just how much work even a low maintenance garden can be. I remember one of his early shows, where he was turning over his garden to plant his veggies. He paused in his labors to wipe the sweat from his face. He said something to the effect of: how come you never see the host of most gardening shows ever breaking a sweat? Amen, Brother. Amen.
Anyway, back to the spring cleanup. One of the changes that aging (and arthritis) brings is that you have take into account that some things just take more time than they used to. Gardening is one of those things. Five or ten years ago I was usually able to clean up my garden in one weekend. I also paid for it with back, hamstrings and foot pain that would just kill me for several days. I usually was so wiped out that I didn’t want to get back into the yard for several weeks. I can no longer sustain that level of effort because my recovery time takes even longer now. Plus, I want to continue to enjoy gardening and I never want to feel like it is a drudgery.
Before: the backyard corner
Before: the backyard border (Messy, messy, messy!)
Now I do my spring cleanup in chunks. If you can look carefully at the before and after pictures posted here you can tell the sunlight is a little different (besides the fact I took that photos at different times of the day). That is because several weeks passed from when I started to when I finished the cleanup. Bad weather was partially responsible for the delay, but most of the time lapse was because I only worked when I felt like it, and when I did feel like it I only put an hour or two in. The garden still got cleaned up and I didn’t beat myself up in the process. I guess I am finally getting a little wisdom to go along with the wrinkles and gray hair.
After: a nice clean haircut
After: let the gardening season begin!
As a side note: I made some changes to some sections of my border gardens last year and I am excited to see how they turn out. In one corner of the back yard I dug out a bunch of decorative Blue Globe thistle and replaced them with Black-eyed Susan’s and Madrone Sedums. I love the thistle, but it had spread so much that the back corner was just a solid wall of green for most of the season. Rather boring. I’ll post pictures in late summer to show how it turned out.
In the meantime, I’ll continue to put in an hour or two in the garden several days of the week. The rest of my gardening time will involve lounging in my hammock on warm summer days and enjoying all the flora and fauna in my own backyard.
In the meantime, happy gardening my friends.
