So, let’s talk about the time we put into gardening. It’s probably more than some would like and yet, less than some might think.
When we describe our gardens to people, it’s a fairly knee jerk reaction that we “must spend a lot of time” doing it. And while yes, we do have to put time into it, it’s probably not as much as one would think. We can acutely understand and account for this as one of our major gardens isn’t at our home. Rather, this major garden is at a community garden, and thus we can account for pretty every visit to care for 1,700 square feet of gardening space.
Our average visit to this garden is about 30 to 45 minutes. Sometimes that’s multiple times a week, such as during heat waves or early in the season where we have to water very regularly. Sometimes that’s not at all, especially if we get decent rainfall and nothing needs imminent harvesting. These visits usually involve some manner of harvesting, watering, fertilizing or perhaps a brief amount of weeding. But, our visits are usually not that involved and we’re able to “get in and get out.”
Once a month or so, we often have a much more involved visit. This is usually to perform a significant harvest or dealing with a major weeding session, like we did today. On these days, we’re often caring for our garden for perhaps about 3 to 4 hours. Our efforts at this garden are definitely aided by ample use of weed fabric, but this doesn’t entirely eliminate those larger efforts like weeding.
We’ve really come to appreciate the years that we’ve used community gardens. It’s definitely trained us in thinking about gardening priorities and making sure the time we’re actually “gardening” is well spent. While we certainly spend some moments admiring our plants and hard work, we always have an immediate purpose when visiting this garden.
Now, obviously we’ve taken things a bit further where we have many different gardens, nine at last count. All of these are smaller in nature than this much larger garden. But, we treat them very similarly and try to optimize our time when we’re directly caring for them. Our perspective is not all that different from our community garden where we try to “get in and get out.”
Some are likely curious how we manage to operate so many gardens, seemingly with ease. Part of it is this mentality and optimizing the tasks that we perform at any given point. Another big part of it is investing into things that save us a lot of time. Examples of these include using weed fabric, techniques that reduce watering requirements, irrigation systems and simply not doing certain things more frequently than is necessary. In a word, it’s experience in growing.
Honestly, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that we spend more time investing into you all through our Frosty Garden efforts than we spend on actual gardening! We don’t keep track and there’s no score to settle. One thing’s true, we definitely spend more time preserving our gardens! But, if you’re struggling with the amount of time you have to invest, we’ll tell you that it does get both easier and better over the years!
