03/17/2024
Work smarter, not harder.
I need to tattoo that on my hand or something.
There are regular, repetitive tasks in the garden that have the ability to consume insane amounts of time, especially as the gardening area grows. The two that eat the most time for me are watering and w**ding.
You can get away with forgetting/putting off pulling w**ds, but be neglectful with watering when your plants need it and at best you lose production and at worst you can lose everything. I went with the buy-once-cry-once solution and installed drip irrigation everywhere. Several hours and hundreds of feet of watering now gets done without me. My job is to a walk around and visually check for function and make sure the timers don’t have dead batteries. Even with the cheap mechanical timer I have, turning a k**b sure beats dragging a hose for an hour or two.
I’ll be blunt, w**ding sucks. But if you want to reduce competition for nutrients, be able to find your cucumbers, and not harvest grass with your lettuce, it’s gotta happen. If you procrastinate, that little amount of regular time spent can literally grow into major job. I’m on my third weekend and have spent countless evenings after work trying to reclaim my gardens after I took last year off. If I was diligent, I could have simply tarped my beds that fall and be doing more productive things right now. I’m sharing Kim’s post because she’s a smart gardener and does awesome work with cut flowers. But check it out; how hard would it be to get in there and w**d between all of those plants?! That 9 hours she spent yesterday will pay for itself in under a week during the growing season.
Thanks for reminding me Kim! Until I can get a semi truck’s worth of wood chips, I need to get going with some w**d barrier. Pronto.
