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If you want a low-maintenance garden, deadheading (removing the spent blooms of plants to encourage new growth) is probably on your list of chores to eliminate. Personally, I don't mind deadheading. It gives me a chance to commune with my plants and take a close look at how they're doing. Sometimes I'm pleasantly surprised to find a flock of ladybugs snuggled into the roses. Sometimes I'm horrifed to discover that the aphids have colonized the lupins. But I always discover something when I'm deadheading. It's also a relatively mindless activity, that lets your brain do other things, such as invent ideas for articles or even write them.
The first principle is the most obvious; scale down your garden. As Dennis S. Schrock puts it in his excellent article, "Low-Maintenance Landscaping","Sweeping vistas are dramatic for public gardens, but home landscapes are more intimate if kept at a smaller scale." He recommends choosing only small areas for intensive landscaping and letting other areas naturalize. Decide how much "garden" you can realistically look after, and stick to it. Convert the rest to a more naturalized landscape, hardscape, or even lawn (which is still easier to maintain than many gardens). For instance, you might want to stop growing vegetables. I know; I shudder even to write this, but realistically, does any other type of gardening take up as much time and cause as much anxiety as growing good-looking, tasty organic vegetables? From the time the bed gets seeded or the transplants go in, the vegetable gardener is at the mercy of every change of weather or plague of insects or disease that descends on his or her garden. I still plant a vegetable garden every year and am obsessed enough to the point of refusing to 'go away' during the summer because the garden will suffer. But consider this simple question that my husband asks (also every year); 'Why do you spend so much time and energy growing corn when they sell it here for six for a dollar in season?" Consider this question, insert your own favorite crop and price, and then figure in how much your time and energy is worth. You'll come up with your own answer, but I don't bother to grow corn any more. I just wasn't getting enough pleasure out of it to make it worth it. I use the space for dahlias now, because I get more pleasure out of cutting bouquets for the house, than harvesting cobs. |
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