We want to touch briefly on the topic of time management and how we organize the often overwhelming task of raising a garden! Like many of you, we are working people and have full time jobs, but we’re also trying to raise a considerable sized garden. It can be trying at times, especially since many things in gardening are somewhat time sensitive.
Often, we use our weekends to perform those “big tasks” when we have a bit more time. This often means we’re doing our major sowing efforts, maybe setting up new growing spaces or otherwise anything that is going to take several hours for us to perform. We’ll often take advantage of both of our weekend days, especially when things ramp up. It’s super important that we seize the time we do have and use it to our advantage.
Our weeknights are usually much more cramped. We often get home late, have to make dinner and we also often use this time to engage with all of you! On these nights, we try to pick off little “micro tasks” that we can easily get in and out of. Often, of course, we’re watering our plants. But, when we have a bigger task that we need to do, we might break up it up over multiple nights. For example, maybe we only transplant one type of plant and go one-by-one over multiple nights.
It’s also really important for us to balance our growing efforts against our other interests. Whether it’s exercise, our other hobbies that aren’t gardening or making time for family & friends, these are important to tend to as well. We try not to let growing become “all consuming” in our lives. It certainly does attempt to take over, but we do our best to tend to all aspects of our lifestyle as well.
Sometimes, you just don’t feel like doing anything. After a rough workday or when things didn’t go as expected, you might have planned to get something done but you just don’t have it in you. We have those days too! And sometimes, the right thing to do is just put it off, tend to that mental or physical health and deal with the consequence later. But, we will tell you that gardening isn’t for the lazy! You can’t have too many of those days before things add up to the point of being overwhelming.
People often look at us and wonder “how we do it all” and it’s through this kind of reasonable time and task management that we make it work. For you older folks, that menas “Carpe Diem” and for you younger folks, “YOLO!”
Oh, and we announced our talk for the Anchorage Garden Club next week! If you’re in the Anchorage area, we’d love to see you. Link in the comments!
