Attention! You don’t have to be old to hate maintenance tasks: weeding, hoeing, watering and all the other things that require physical effort or time that some of us don’t have!
This text follows on from the previous one entitled: When Old Age Rhymes With Laidbackness, but Above All With Intelligence! In that article, I mentioned that, of the three major stages in the cultivation of a garden, the one that requires the most effort and often limits a gardening enthusiast is undoubtedly maintenance during the growing season.
In life, you don’t get something for nothing! When you want something, you have to make the effort to get it. A free lunch doesn’t give the same satisfaction as time, effort and patience. But is the degree of satisfaction proportional to the amount of effort required to achieve it? Personally, I don’t think so! After more than 50 years of gardening, I’m more satisfied than I used to be, with less effort, less time spent on maintenance, less use of horticultural products and, what’s more, less money spent. A personal gain that has repercussions on many aspects of my life.
Time Management
All the time you spend in the garden is time you no longer have for other activities that interest you. If we want to travel, take vacations, see our children and grandchildren, go to shows, invite friends or simply relax on the patio with an drink, we need time! With only 24 hours in the day, time management is essential. Sometimes we have to make agonizing choices about what we want to accomplish, because we just don’t have the time.
Faced with this obvious fact, I’ve had to make choices myself. Either I garden and accept that I won’t have enough time to do other things I’d like to do, or I give up gardening to have time to do other things… but live with the regret of not satisfying my passion for gardening? Especially as we get older, gardening takes more and more out of us!
My Approach To Growing
What if I were to find the best of both worlds? Inhabited by the adage: “If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll only get what you’ve always got, nothing more!”, I wondered if I could garden differently, trying to copy nature as much as possible, which makes no effort to grow plants. Through observation, I recognized eight major environmental principles that give the plant world its autonomy. Using them as a basis for gardening, I’ve been able to develop an approach to cultivation that respects these great principles and saves me an inordinate amount of time on upkeep.
I’ve named them accordingly:
(I made up the names, but not the principles they represent. These principles are immutable and have existed for thousands of years!)
- Nature’s Shepherd’s Pie;
- Garments of the Earth;
- The oil lamp;
- Survival of the fittest;
- Light, the source of plant life;
- A leopard can’t change its spots;
- Live and let live;
- Patience is a virtue.
Basically, nature will do its job if the plant environment has the right soil structure. This structure is ubiquitous throughout the planet and is always composed of three fundamental layers, like a shepherd’s pie!
You’ll notice that in nature, wherever there are plants, there are three types of material. First, the soil. This can be sandy, silty, clayey, or even rocky. On top of this is a layer of humus, the result of the accumulation of organic matter over time. Finally, the top layer is made up of dead plants (mulch) and/or living plants (ground cover) that cover the surface.
What Are The Roles Of These Three Layers?
Soil or rock: Provides a support medium for plants, and a supply of water and minerals that rise up from the subsoil through capillary action.
Humus: Dark in color, this layer shelters ecosystem life and is a source of nutrients.
Mulch or ground cover: Protects against drying out, temperature variations, soil compaction, weed control and also serves as food for the soil ecosystem.
But be careful! Just like shepherd’s pie (meat, corn, potatoes), natural shepherd’s pie needs the right ingredients. In nature, the three layers don’t have the same components if it’s a prairie, a deciduous woodland or a coniferous forest. We’ll come back to this in a later text. You’ll see, it’s not difficult to understand!
Nature’s shepherd’s pie! This is the first principle that revealed so many things to me, and to which the other seven principles are linked.
Would you like to know more about the other principles?
Thanks to my understanding of these natural laws and principles, I’ve been able to eliminate a whole host of garden maintenance tasks and continue gardening at 65 with greater ease than at 20, without compromising yields – quite the opposite, in fact.
How thick can a layer of leaves be before it’s too thick and always wet ? Should they not touch the base of the plants like mulch? What about with drought tolerant plants?
My mother always said, “Use your head and spare your back.” She was very resourcefull and clever about finding better ways to do things. At 75 and 80, my husband and I are careful about what we do and how we do it. Since we have 5 acres, we get more help for heavy work such as mulching our many beautiful trees. At our pace, some things might never get done! Long ago we started moving heavy loads such as fallen wood by sliding them on a plastic tarp. Works fabulously! More jobs are two person jobs than one person now. Worst of all is the late summer heat, dryness, humidity and bugs here in Virginia. Every year I think will be our last to work our place. But then spring comes!!
I love your attitude, Ann. Thanks for sharing. Have fun this spring! 🙂