Garden management

Managing your garden means maintaining the garden as best you can with the available resources and labor while having a life at the same time. The amount of maintenance required will depend upon the kind of garden you have and what you want it to look like. My main goal is to grow food and increase biological diversity and appearance is somewhere down the list of priorities. I’ll try and make the garden look good if I can do it without too much effort, but I’m not going to spend hours on cosmetic surgery.

How much maintenance is necessary also varies according to what part of the garden you are talking about. You expect the wilder areas to look natural, so they only need as much care as is required to keep them growing well. On the other hand you expect the areas immediately adjacent to the house to be a lot more manicured and so will spend most of your maintenance time on them. Exactly how much is open to debate, depending on whether you want them to be immaculate or are happy with the semi-abandoned look.

When you get down to the practical questions of what to do and in what order, a large garden can sometimes feel so overwhelming that you don’t quite know where to start. If this happens just concentrate on one garden area at a time and rotate around the various areas one at a time. Obviously you will have to devote a lot more time to the intensively planted areas than you will the wilder ones (which may not need any attention at all).

A chalkboard is a useful management tool, keep it on the shed wall where you can write down tasks that need doing promptly (and don’t erase them until they are done). A calendar is also useful for noting down longer term tasks that need doing at some point in the year. There is an ideal time for every task and you are more likely to be successful if you do them at the right time (trees and shrubs should be planted or moved while they are dormant in winter, layering is done in spring). You don’t want to miss this ideal time, if you do you may then have to wait another year.

Gardening involves living, growing things and differs from other arts in that it is never static. As the plants get bigger they transform the growing conditions and the character of the garden around them. This continuous change opens up a whole range of opportunities and potential problems. You may have to intervene when a plant grows bigger than you envisioned, when an area becomes overcrowded, or when plants start to suffer from shading. These changes can be a good thing in that they can push you to try something new. In the past couple of years some of my shrubs have started to outgrow their locations and need to be moved. When they go dormant this fall I plan to move some of them to wilder areas, where they will form new colonies and help to make those areas more productive.

As you gain experience you will find a lot of the maintenance tasks get done almost unconsciously when you are out in the garden. This was brought home to me very vividly when I broke my foot and could only hobble around the garden on crutches (which aren’t designed for off road as they keep getting snagged on brambles and other vegetation). The garden still got watered because the irrigation is on a timer, but so many little things got neglected (isolated plants that needed water, harvesting, gopher checking, weeding). These are things I don’t even think about normally, I just do them.

It’s a good idea to take a walk around your garden once a year and evaluate how it is progressing. What needs to be done, what’s working well and what isn’t working at all. Make an inventory of your garden plants to see which ones are really paying their way and which ones are just taking up space and giving nothing in return. Over time your garden will often accumulate plants that grow well and take up space, but don’t actually get used for anything. This isn’t usually a problem in a big garden, but it can be in a small one where space is at a premium. In such cases you may want to replace them with something more useful. While evaluating your plants you should also note down any that obviously aren’t happy and find out why (are they water stressed, getting too much shade, too much sun?). If necessary move them to a better spot.

Garden management isn’t just about maintaining what you have created, it is also about improving the garden, making it more beautiful, more productive and more useful. Garden design books often treat management as an afterthought but I think it is actually the most important part of creating a garden (it’s certainly the one that takes up the most time). The design gives you an idea of where the major parts go and the construction produces a real garden out of your plans, but they only constitute the birth of the garden. It grows into a real garden when you are out working in the garden day after day. Only then do you develop the perspective and insight into how best to take it further, so you can polish that rough diamond into a dazzling gem (or whatever else you are after).

It’s a good habit to try and do a little bit extra every day (or as often as time allows), something that will have a long term effect and make the garden better.