How I'm spending my summer vacation
The Lazy Woman’s Guide to Gardening
By Sharon Fisher, 6-18-07
I love the *idea* of gardening, making things grow and thrive and eating the freshest of vegetables and fruits.
Sadly, the fantasy doesn’t always live up to the reality.
This whole gardening thing is fairly new to me, but these are some of the things I’ve learned in my quest to reduce the amount of work.
1. Pick your plants and seeds carefully. You’re looking for words like “Perennial” and “Enthusiastic self-seeder.” aka Things You Won’t Have to Plant Again. “Thrives on neglect” is another good one.
2. Don’t pull up weeds in a section of garden until you’re ready to plant that section. Nature abhors a vacuum, and if you pull weeds up without putting in new things, all it means is new weeds will come up and you’ll have to pull them, too. Besides, from a distance, who can tell? Hell, they’re green, aren’t they? When in doubt, throw in some marigold seed. Not only are they green, but they have pretty flowers and they are a natural insect repellent.
3. A remarkable number of garden problems can be solved by the addition of two things: water and mulch. By mulch I don’t mean gravel and bark and stuff; that takes work. I mean, stuff from the chicken house, old hay, newspapers, things like that. The mulch stops the weeds and holds in the water, resulting in Less Work.
4. Get animals, such as chickens, ducks, rabbits, or goats. What you clean out of the garden, give to the animals. What you clean out of the animals’ pen, dump in the garden. The circle of life. It’s a beautiful thing. (However, do keep the animals and the garden away from each other; the animals may have a different idea from you on what constitutes a ‘weed,’ and this can result in More Work.)
5. Redefine your idea of ‘weed.’ If you can eat it, it’s not a weed, it’s a vegetable. If I could get into the whole eating dandelions thing, I could save a hell of a lot of time.
6. If it’s ripe, pull it. Don’t wait for it to be perfect. If you do, either some damn bird or animal or insect will get to it before you do, or it’ll bolt or die or turn into a baseball bat or something, resulting in Wasted Work.
7. For every outdoor spigot you have, get one of these from somewhere. It’s called a manifold, and it lets you turn one faucet into four. Collect all the garden hose you can—garage sales are good. Then pick up a bunch of these. It’s called a soaker hose, and it’s a hose with a bunch of holes in it. The difference is that these are there on purpose.
Run a length of garden hose from all the new faucets to all the garden spaces, and surround them with soaker hoses. From then on, watering consists of sauntering outside, turning on a spigot, moving a switch on the selected faucet, and having a beer while you wait.
If you really want to be lazy, put battery-operated timers on each of the faucets and set them up to run on different days. Yes, this is all some work to begin with, but it’s just once a season. Leave them out there all winter. So what if it cracks? It’s just a $10 hose, and that way you won’t have to take it down in the fall and set it up again in the spring.
8. Especially if you do #7, set your lawnmower to 3 inches. At least. And say, maybe pick up some hose repair kits while you’re at it.
9. If you have a drip irrigation system, a couple of times a year it’ll suddenly quit working. You’ll think the well ran dry. You’ll think your neighbor was stealing your water. You’ll worry about the dwindling aquifer. You’ll look fruitlessly for leakage. Nine times out of ten, the connector between the hose and the system has gotten clogged with dirt or earwigs or something. Check it first. And check both sides.
10. For God’s sake, don’t get green-handled garden tools, gloves, etc. I spend half my time in the garden trying to find the damn things. Wait til May and get pink ones, even if you’re a guy. Better still, wait til August when they’re on sale. Ponder the notion of pink garden hose while you’re at it.
11. When it gets over 90, there are only two jobs I do. First, I mow the lawn, because I have a riding mower and no matter how hot it is, at least I’m sitting down. Besides, it has a cup holder. Second, I do things involving water—fixing the irrigation, hosing off the house and trash cans, etc.—because at least that way if I get wet it feels good.
12. If you’re uncoiling something dark for the first time—hoses, edging, etc.—pick a nice day, leave the damn thing in the sun for a half hour and go have a beer. You’ll both be a lot happier.
13. Have a small child. Tell the small child in spring that your very favorite flower is the dandelion. Tell the small child in summer that your very favorite flower is bindweed. Praise the small child lavishly when it presents you with bouquets of that season’s favorite flower.
14. Practice the following phrases:
“I’m xeriscaping.”
“I’m creating natural habitat.”
“It’s a native plant garden.”
“Don’t you know that lawnmowers and weed whackers are major contributors to global warming?”
[End of article]
Don't forget to read Jack Kerouac to your beets.
Comment By Sharon Fisher, 6-18-07I'm actually not getting the reference. Which Kerouac, and why beets?
Comment By D'Glenn, 6-18-07Er ... time to go rearrange my quote of the day queue ...
Re: tip #5: over the weekend my girlfriend added some rather tasty greens to lunch after having me taste a few leaves and give my opinion on the flavour, and looking up the plant's nutritional info (compared favorably to spinach in some respects, and beat lettuce in pretty much everything). When I noticed that she said it was from "the yard" istead of "the garden", I asked, "so it's a weed?"
Sure enough, a weed, from a clump now flagged with a plastic butterfly "don't accidentally mow this" marker.
At some point over the weekend I heard her use the word 'volunteers' to describe things she hadn't planted but didn't plan to pull out.
Yes, 'volunteer' is the standard term for them. I just call them Less Work.
So what's the weed she was using? I've actually been pretty impressed by how many of the things that grow around here by themselves are actually edible, which may simply reflect the desperation of early pioneers and Native Americans. My yard has dandelion, salsify, wild lettuce, amaranth...they aren't great but at least if I'm reduced to 'living off the land' in a literal sense I won't die of scurvy or something.
Re: comments #1 & 2.
Wasn't Kerouac known as "King of the Beets?"
Purslain. Small leaves, nice crunch, a little tangier than spinach, and I could taste how iron-rich it was. The kind of flavour you might expect to find in a yuppie grocery store, but I was completely unfamiliar with it before. I'd seen the plant in the past but had never thought to ask what it was or whether it was edible -- it was always just one more weed growing where people wanted grass instead.
Comment By Jill Kuraitis, 6-18-07For shady places where you'd like Less Work, try woodruff. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodruff Spreads slowly, needs no fertilizer or bug repellent, and chokes out its own weeds. Brilliant stuff. Right up there with beer, although a riding mower with a cup holder sounds like my next Mother's Day present.
Comment By milton, 6-18-07Don't forget trees. Plant once,harvest for 20 years.
Comment By Idagreen, 6-18-07Please stop associating "xeriscape and native" gardens with ill-tended weed patches.
There are a lot of folks working hard in the landscape industry to promote more sustainable and earth friendly practices when it come to our gardens. Equating these methods to laziness simply undermines this effort. I know you're trying to be witty, I guess I just don't find it amusing that you trivialize an important, fledgling movement towards sustainable landscapes. As a point of reference, there are more acres in lawn in this country than there are those actively farmed for food.
People need to get over the "idea" of the romantic notion of local foods and natural landscapes that require no effort, no commitment and no change in behavior. Your riding lawn mower most likely has higher emissions than a Hummer, and yes, lawn mowers and other small engines do make a significant contribution to the accumulation of greenhouse gases. Is that funny? The joke is lost on me.
Now you know why there's no book on humor and xeriscaping!
Comment By heather, 6-18-07I've always found yelling at people to be an effective way of winning them over... go milton
Comment By Sharon Fisher, 6-18-07Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhh....Kerouac.....beets....got it. <slaps forehead>>
I have some purslane myself. It grows wild in the horse trough I grow strawberries in, and we give it a nibble once in a while. It's one of the weeds that I quit pulling.
I've thought about woodruff. I've heard it smells lovely. Glad to know it can grow in shade. I basically pick up stuff as I discover it, and I haven't encountered it thus far.
Yes, trees! I've planted two cherries, each of which died, and an almond, which surprisingly survives. I also have a volunteer mulberry, if you can believe that, as well as a lot of volunteer Russian olives. That's on top of the apricot and apple trees I also have.
Regarding trivializing important environmental concerns, people as far back as Shakespeare and earlier used humor to make points. People often will listen to humor when they might resist something more direct. As a worker in the landscape industry myself, yes, I am familiar with the industry's efforts to become more sustainable, and I'd be happy to hear about specific instances for future articles.
I'm flattered that you think my little humor piece here has so much power, but really, I don't think it's going to hurt the burgeoning sustainability effort significantly.
Sharon, just remember Maynard G. Krebs with the bongos beeting out a tune.
Comment By Sharon Fisher, 6-19-07You know, I actually never saw that program and never heard of it til I was an adult. Just once, then, I made a point of catching a tiny speck of it so I would know what people were talking about.
Comment By Stan Kidwell, 6-20-07Great article Sharon.
Emma, my granddaughter, brings me dandelion "flowers" once in a while. Would asking for the roots and all be the wrong thing to do?
We have a couple of raised beds and I have trouble just remembering to water the tomatoes, peppers and pumpkins. Hope they like abuse.
Actually, some people believe in not watering tomatoes once they set fruit, saying that this results in a smaller but more intensely flavored tomato. There was one year when that worked very well for me.
It'd be great if we could train the kids to bring the roots, eh? but I'll settle for the flowers.
The one thing I won't do is scream at her for blowing "wishes" all over the yard when the dandelions go to seed. My mom did that when I was a kid, and it really bummed me out.
Well, if you hadn't insisted on blowing wishes, dandelions would be an endagered species. Well, . . . maybe not.
Comment By Carlo Porteen, 6-25-07June 25, 2007
My daughter's garden was destroyed in Glasgow due to hail. I'm worried that my garden may to destroyed. It's worse than being a wheat farmer.
...and with any luck you will get a new generation of beets!
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