The growing season starts fast, and you want to get the most out of your garden. Overwhelm can creep in and keep you from getting things done in the garden and make you fall even MORE behind. What do you do?
There’s actually a gift hidden in garden overwhelm. Watch the video to discover it.
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In the comments below, let us know what makes you feel overwhelmed. What kinds of things in your garden are hard to put aside?
Thanks for the article on fungus gnats!
The source of my current garden overwhelm is too cold nights – usually down to 7°C! I live on Vancouver Island and we are experiencing the coldest spring in a very long time. I cannot plant out my tomatoes, peppers, squash, or seed beans or corn. Which means that the tomatoes and peppers are outgrowing their pots. I do not have space inside to house larger pots under lights or to start the flowers that I meant to have in the veggie beds. I bought some cloches and will try planting some of the tomatoes and peppers and cover with cloches to see if they survive with this minimal protection. I have also for the first time had a serious outbreak of fungus gnats which has weakened many of the tomatoes!!!
I’d be interested in how you make a cage for your kale that won’t come down.
Funny! Stacey! You talked about the bee crawling on you….then you declared that your garden was “humming along”!
🙂
I moved in with my father in 2020, as he wasn’t coping well with lockdown and has subsequently been diagnosed with vascular dementia, and I’m now his primary carer. I thought the garden would be my escape route for when things got tough but was faced with a wilderness that was overgrown and regrew after being cut down. My daughter pops over and helps with the massive jobs but on a daily basis, I began with trying to suppress the weeds, so bought a load of woodchip, and now try to keep on top of the weeds as they push through and find some other little manageable job to increase the area that is no longer totally wild. To do that I designated a part of the garden (it’s fairly big) that would be for wildlife with trees, nuts, wild flowers, etc – it’s a lovely place now because it takes care of itself, with a little effort from me. The next section would provide a bit of food and is being gradually turned into a food forest, with the only mown part being paths and a bit of pruning for volunteers and pioneers in the wrong places. And I love daisies and buttercups in the lawn, so they stay and that gives me space between mowings, that now no longer need to be done so often. Next to the sterile lawns and bare earth flower beds of the neighbours, it’s looking lush and green and has divine shady areas to sit in on scorching hot days. It will probably always be a bit of a work in progress but then I will always have a reason to escape into the garden.
I love my little garden. Spring greets me with a carpet of Lilly of the Valley Lilacs and Hosta’s. At first ,they are lovely. Later in the season, the Lilacs have bloomed, the Lily of the Valley have died back , and weeds take over the ground. As I am getting older and cannot bend down to weed, I find this quite frustrating to keep this area neat. Any ideas. I love your suggestions. Thank you
Collecting seeds. I’m only collecting the ones that REALLY are ready and not focusing on the rest.
(If the birds get some, so what. Happy birds!)
RAINING TO THE POINT THAT i CAN’T GET INTO THE GARDEN TO REMOVE THE WEEDS.
I feel overwhelmed by weeds like thistle and another I have not identified! Both perpetuate themselves via underground root systems. Therefore, corn gluten will not work. And, I don’t want to use anything like RoundUp.
My Zucchini is growing sooo fast and I have a couple that are 15″ long! I don’t know what to do with those big ones! They were hiding under the leaves and i didn’t see them until they were huge!
I fertilize on Saturdays, I will make a list, sounds like a Great idea!
I am overwhelmed (and overrun) by gophers. The only plants that are safe are the caged ones. Any one know how to get rid of them compassionately?
It’s spring — so everything is growing, but the only thing that I am harvesting is — lettuce. Lots and lots of lettuce! Woo hoo! it’s funny, I’ve waited for SO LONG for our lettuce to start producing, and now, suddenly, we have this over-abundance of lettuce! I’m a neo-salad eater, if you know what I mean. Salads have never been my go-to meal, but it certainly is NOW, because my lettuces are ecstatic about No. Snow. And so am I.
So — I’ve got more lettuce than I can eat in salads, so I’m including them in sandwiches (which I have never been a fan of before, but I’m learning to appreciate now) and I’m using them to hold a thing that I’ve never done before, like, using them in place of a bun for a hamburger. Why have I never done this before? Store-bought buns are a complete waste of calories! I can keep my hands clean using a couple of leaves of lettuce (and a slice of tomato, of course) and add crunch at the same time. Mind. Blown. I’m 65 and the habits of a lifetime are hard to overcome — but this rocks!
My one step this week is to plant our cool weather crops. Our last frost date has past or comes in the next week or so.
I think making a list of things I’m not going to do is amazing! Doing one thing and letting the rest go … is so freeing! I usually just worry about all of it…which is totally nonproductive.
I have a greenhouse and I had cherry tomatoes blooming all winter. It was amazing and overwhelming. I knew I had to harvest them … but it was overwhelming because there were constantly so many! So they would fall and relplant! Then I had more and more tiny plants until we finally pulled everything out! (And I have so much tomato paste that we use often and has such great flavor as a reward!)
I would like to watch you deal with the rat or vole>>>they have eater through the tulle and seem undeterred by everything else I have tried. The only block that has worked 60% is hot chili flakes, but I don’t want to burn the roots if I put it around the plant base and the water the plant. We had one that went into a little catch and release cage and had babies after the door shut.
I do this, too! I call it “just do one thing”. I pick one main garden task for the day, and if I get that done, then I decide if I want to do another thing. Having raised beds is very helpful, because I can focus on planting/weeding/harvesting one bed at a time.
fast growing weeds with deep roots. I have to disturb the roots of my crop to get the weeds out.
I knew this was going to be a crazy busy year but I planned to do a year garden plan and start many of the seeds I saved from last year’s permaculture garden. No time and I still have to set up the grow lights I bought for my sunroom. So … I have started companion planting and cover crop sowing – yay! And have found very reasonable plant starts at local nurseries and my coop grocery.
This week I am planting 12 heirloom tomatoes in umpteen varieties, to protect the row of sugar snap peas that are producing now from the afternoon sun.