No Work Gardening
Redesigning
In my case, I’m sitting with the heat turned up designing the garden. And this week, it just got a ton smaller. I’ve been planning on a display garden scale and I’ve just decided that I’m going to make it a lot smaller and easier to manage. I’m feeling pretty lazy and I’m really not that interested right now in signing up for a lot of weeding and plant management. I got to thinking about the kinds of things that would make a garden easier to manage on a larger scale. What is it that I can do that would make my garden a no-work garden? You see, some parts of my garden, i.e. the trial beds and vegetable beds, require constant attention. I absolutely need to be there to manage those beds because one provides me with information about new plants and the other feeds me. Containers, whether they sit on the porch or hang, need a lot of work with their daily watering and weekly feeding and pruning so these too require work. Some perennials are no brainers for this no-work gardening because they aren’t a lot of work but there are others that seem to demand more attention than I might like to give them and their days are numbered in my gardens. I have all the pictures and experience I need with them, thank you very much, so why grow them?
Guidelines Coming
I’m going to give you a few guidelines then on how to reduce the workload in the garden. What things to do that will both enhance the look of the garden while lowering the amount of work you do. Some of these things will cost you a bit of money to set up and maintain and some will be free to do. But all will reduce your workload and give you a better garden. Our decisions have to do with plant decisions, weed control decisions, pest controls and some management issues.
Plant Decisions
Plant decisions I’m looking at mean that every plant I grow outside of the trial beds has to be a low maintenance plant able to survive on it’s own without a lot of fuss and muss. No more big grandiflora petunias with their need for daily flower deadheading will ever be grown in my gardens. Unless that petunia is self-pruning (like the Wave series) then I’m not going to have it. Salvia and marigolds with their need to be deadheaded to keep blooming are out. It either blooms and keeps itself neat and tidy without help from me or it’s not getting out of the garden center. Impatiens are the perfect plant in this regard. I’m going to grow a ton more impatiens everywhere next year, from Sunpatiens in full sun to the more traditional shade-lovers everywhere else from part-shade through to full shade.
Perennials
Perennials are going to be similarly managed. I’m thinking that the long-blooming daylilies will form the backbone of my garden because I don’t have to do a darn thing to them except cut them down in the fall (and this fall I didn’t even do that because of my traveling) Then I’ll toss in the Echinacea for daisy-style flowers, a few plants such as Liatris and perennial Geraniums for easy-to-grow plants on poor soils. I’ll make sure any plant that tends to get sick, such as Phlox with their inevitable powdery mildew, is out of my garden. I have no time or inclination to baby plants that don’t want to grow in my garden. If you can grow this plant without it dropping leaves from the bottom so it looks leggy, then more power to you. The other thing about most of the perennials that I’ll be growing is that I won’t bother deadheading them. I’ll let the birds take the seeds and then once a season, whack them all to the ground in the fall with the shears. Bloom by yourself over a long time or die.
Roses
Roses are going to be similarly managed in my no-work garden. While I can grow tender tea roses without losing them to winter by deep-planting, I want roses that bloom all summer with no work. Or roses that give me massive amounts of fragrant blooms for a short season and then get on with the job of being attractive shrubs. I’m not interested in anything that even remotely gets blackspot so those can stay in the nursery. There are enough rose choices now on the market that are disease resistant and long-blooming that the sicko-roses (no matter how loverly the fragrance or bloom) will never be given garden space.
Shrubs
Shrubs are being chosen for having two characteristics. A shrub has to have two characteristics from a) long-blooming, b) interesting foliage c) fragrance or d) massive flowering. I’m assuming the shrub is rock hardy so give me two of these four characteristics or stay home. Fragrance is high on that list I can tell you so shrubs such as Lilacs and Mock-orange have a good chance of being grown.
That’s the first key to the no-work garden. Do the planning to pick the right plants. The rest will come along in the next few weeks.
My idea of “winter interest” is a plant/seed catalog and a cup of tea. I love living where there are seasons – where I can garden intensely for part of the year and be indoors, fussing with the Meyer lemons and amaryllis bulbs during the cold months. To my mind, winter is the time to dream.
In the cold season we can plan out those sensible, low-workload gardens in a time when we’re not tempted by the wealth of plants that are available in the spring. In the winter we convince ourselves that we can indeed control our habit… and then spring comes and we are seduced once again, finding ourselves drunk on flowers, foliage and wonderful possibilities.
@C.L. Fornari -
CL – you said it much better than I did. “Spring comes and we are seduced again.” Oh yeah. I was thinking today that my dormancy is not new – that I’ve been here before. And yeah, spring seduction is likely a promise, not a prediction. Thanks for that perceptive moment.
Boy, you have really captured the essence of no work gardening! Come this spring I’m even going to try my hand at strawbale vegetable gardening. No tilling or digging. I like raised beds, too. Have used them for my root type veggies and herbs until we moved. Now I’m having to start all over. This past spring and summer I planted several flowering and fragrant shrubs, roses, and perennials. Managed to get in a butterfly garden and a shade garden, too. Not much into annuals…too much work for such short-lived plants. The best part of gardening work is carrying a cold glass of Iced Tea to the shade garden and relaxing on my bench.:-)
@JoAnn -
Glad you liked it – “no work” gardening is high on my agenda at the moment. Lots more articles coming in the next few weeks.
After getting side tracked this past growing season, I realized how much my flower gardens are self sustaining. And boy was I glad. Between the perennials, hardy annuals, iris and lily plants things were in pretty good shape. Got a nasty weed in the big bed that will have to be dealt with. Nutgrass spreads by growing very tiny seed balls on the root. Yep, pull up the weed those little seed balls stay right in the soil. Going to experiment by pulling the plant just as soon as I see a bit of leaf, digging the root, soil and all out and disposing of them in the trash. If either of these methods work, it will still take several years before there is no more weed.
Happy planning and planting. LB
@Linda B -
That’s the only way to get rid of that noxious weed. Good luck with it.
“What indeed do gardeners do during the winter time?”
I hate to admit this, but when we have a serious thaw in January or February, or even March (today it was 80º in Ohio!), I go out and do some weeding in the garden. It’s much more pleasant than in mid-summer, it’s easier to pull all the roots out, and there’s no other gardening chores demanding my energy or attention.
The catalogs are too overwhelming and deceiving for me. I’ve learned how similar they are to real estate ads where “cozy” means cramped. In the seed catalogs, “spilling over” means invasive, “looks best in drifts” means I’ll plant tons of it and my drift will still have bare spots, and it’s recommended to plant things 12″ apart yet the pictures show them all bunched together.
I’m in full agreement with the more-perennials plan, but I have to remind myself to read the seed packets before I buy them! So much to learn…Thanks, Doug, for all the info you pass on.
Chris
@Chris -
for sure and we all fall prey to those colour pictures. Heck, in the industry the mantra is that “colour sells” and this is why most perennial gardens are full of spring and early summer blooms – and very few fall plants. They aren’t in bloom in the spring so they aren’t sold. Hmmm, plants as copywriters – the most successful ones bloom/write in the spring. 
copywriters are copywriters
@Doug -
“Hmmm, plants as copywriters – the most successful ones bloom/write in the spring. ”
This goes right along with my theory regarding the “early to bed, early to rise” mantra. Those people were just the first ones up, so they made the rules to suit themselves, and thus claimed a higher moral ground for their personal preference. The spring flowers get the best press and the fall plants get very little. Poor, poor things. Trying to remind people of their autumnal charms, when the gardeners are becoming tired of the chores. (No, wait, I get tired of the chores…real gardeners don’t.)
You mentioned beneficial shrub characteristics. We have a lot of very high winds (in all seasons); most of the flowers and trees develop a serious 30º lean eastward! What kind of small (2 – 3′) shrubs could I plant in clay to protect the garden a little more, and that will look good during the winter as well (Zone 6)?
Thanks, Doug!
Chris