gardening for busy people
As written featured in Geelong and Surf Coast Living magazine 2015-by Peter Shaw
Like anything worth achieving in life, gardening is something that takes discipline, it’s easy to be distracted and simply not get started, which makes it hard to schedule in gardening for busy people. It’s also easy to just dream about all the things that will get done and if you are busy, a lot of what you think will happen, simply won’t come to fruition without some hard work and sacrifice. If you enjoy gardening and the satisfaction it brings by being personally involved you will know what I am talking about. Making time to do what you enjoy is half the battle, like training for a big run or ride the hardest work starts when the alarm rings at 5 am.
Some say if it’s on the calendar it will happen. Last year we realised that the weekends at home where we had no plans were some of our best spent times- when time unraveled, allowing for newspaper reading, pottering and of course gardening. So we started putting weekends at home on the calendar and tried to work other things around them as opposed to having a weekend at home just because nothing else was planned. If you are a busy person with competing demands this type of free time is a rare event worth protecting.
There are two distinct types of gardening. There are the repetitive jobs that don’t take much planning like mowing and edging. Then there are the more creative jobs that take a little more input… things like removing failing plants making way for a fresh group of new plantings. It’s best to not get the two types of work confused. Get the repetitive stuff done first, or as many do pay a professional to do them for you. This is a great tip for gardening for busy people. You can then be free to think more creatively. Warning, its easy to have a burst of energy and zip down to the nursery at 2 pm in the afternoon, spend $200 on plants and then run out of time to put them all in. I often see what I have dubbed a plant cemetery. It’s a sad place out of site where dead and dying plants are all grouped together, often near a tap and hose. I have had my own over the years where I store plants until I get time to put them in. This never works- the plants start to resent you within a few days and turn for the worse, despite the close source of water. So the first lesson here is not to rush out and get all excited by a trip to the nursery or hardware store before you have a rough plan and adequate time.
Gardening- even if you are busy people, is truly a satisfying activity to spend your time doing. We do live in a world where it’s often easier to get someone to do things for us; this is a reality of a modern life. However don’t forget to value the age old satisfying rewards you get by being personally involved in something that is both tactile and practical. If you have young children around, it can be a time when you are all outside doing things together, not necessarily constructive things for adults. Young children see the adults in the garden and often just want to help (this takes a different discipline). For more on children in the garden make sure you read my article on this topic children in the garden. It may not be often and gardening may not be your thing, but I challenge you to mark out some “at home” weekends which should include some gardening- trust me you will feel better for it.
Gardening for busy people, if you would like to free up some time- we can assist in doing it all for you. Call our office on 03 52633133 or use our Contact Us page to connect.
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