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Your mileage may vary—what is gardening, really?

GARDEN

All the gardeners I know have the same problem: Not enough time for their gardens. It’s too easy to put it off for another day. After all, we have “real” work to do; the garden will still be there …

Two results emerge from this dilemma. For one, gardeners are impatient; we want results now and can be very unrealistic about the time and work involved. Second, we rarely find the time to garden together, or talk with each other on the front porch or over the back fence, so we don’t often see what other gardeners really do and how they do it.

In the absence of a good talk over the back fence, I’m offering this conversation about how we garden. It’s not a how-to manual, but a discussion about the most ordinary acts of gardening—weeding, dead-heading, and watering—and how I, and the gardeners I have observed for many years, really do them.

Weeding never ends
Gardening is weeding. All the products in the world can’t keep unwanted guests from climbing up through the soil, creeping over the mulch, or blowing into your yard. Products like Preen prevent new seeds from germinating, but they don’t stop the underground and above-ground runners from running, and they don’t kill perennial weeds. Products like Round-up travel through green leaves to kill many culprits, but they aren’t very effective with horsetail, bedstraw, and the like. As long as you garden, you have to weed.

How do you weed? Do you sit on the ground or a stool? Do you kneel or stoop and pull them out by hand, or use a trowel? Do any of you favor standing up, wielding a long-handled tool?

Older gardeners do one thing a lot more than new gardeners: We cultivate. That is, we stir up the surface of the garden soil with a hoe or rake (or an equivalent hand tool). The practice comes from old-time vegetable gardening when the soil was bare between the rows, before everybody used mulch and planted in wide rows. Then we run along the aisle with a tool to disturb the weed seedlings and break up the crust to let the rain penetrate. But now few gardeners even own a hoe—and this is a deprivation, because they are great tools for wiping out weed seedlings. I have seen gardeners meticulously pulling out hundreds of individual tiny weeds, when it takes only minutes to rough up the whole area with a hoe! (Little seedlings just die and decompose where they lie.) There are pointy hoes to use sideways that dislodge the roots, and flat hoes that scrape the surface. “Scuffle hoes” wobble around and make weeding and cultivation even easier.

You do have to pull or dig out weeds that have taproots or thick, fibrous, matted roots. I had my annual “dandelion day” one day in May, when the soil was moist—one big assault with a Japanese garden knife. This one goes straight down, beside the root, and usually gets all of it. (Every piece left behind grows another plant.) I got most of the dandelions—and a lot of tough buttercups, too.

Then there’s the dig-every-root discussion. I’ve had this talk with gardeners of all stripes. Books tell us to get every perennial root out, but what do you do when there are just too many for that to work? I say pull out as many as possible, as quickly as possible, roots or not, and then mulch the area. (I put cardboard or newspaper under the mulch.) It’s a compromise: Many weeds will still emerge, but that’s a problem for another day.

Deadheading and the real world
Deadheading—the act of nipping off spent flowers so the plant’s energy keeps producing new ones—can be a misleading term. For some annuals it’s deadhead-or-die. But certain situations call for something that might more accurately be called “deadstemming” or something that reminds us to take the whole stem out, not just little flower heads.

Given the state of busy-ness, though, will you really go flower by flower doing this? Some gardeners do it daily, during a languid morning stroll with coffee, or an evening visit with wine in hand. But it helps to know a shortcut (and experience or research will show you which plants thrive from this). For many annuals or perennials, you can simply cut the whole plant back by a third or a half using a hedge clipper or shears. Most will reflower, as long as you’re watering (and fertilizing the annuals). New gardeners are way too gentle, so old-timers need to put it bluntly—don’t be afraid to whack them back!

Soil, compost, and water
These topics all merit volumes, but I’ll just summarize some truths and opinions from other gardeners about the life-or-death matters of soil and watering. You can bypass many mistakes and disappointments if you really absorb this guidance:

Over half the work of gardening is building and improving the soil.

An organic farmer told me, twenty-five years ago, that over fifty percent of what you actually do is gathering and carting organic material, composting it, or getting it into the ground. If we build great soil, success follows. All the instant fertilizers in the world can’t change that simple fact.

When the soil isn’t great, amend it.

Toss in some compost, spread some over the beds annually, and use it as mulch or spread it under other mulches. Compost stimulates the life of your soil, makes its texture better, and helps it hold moisture.

Watering done badly is nearly as bad as not watering at all.

Always water when plants show stress, whether morning, noon, or night. (Morning is ideal.) Shallow watering is a bad practice because it allows roots to remain near the soil surface. Water deeply, not daily (except for tiny seedlings). Your goal is to soak the roots—perhaps 4 inches down for a young vegetable, and 12 inches down for a shrub.

More to talk over
Our conversations will continue, in this magazine and over our respective fences. We can mull over mulch and compare notes on how we fight (or succumb to) deer, insect pests, or diseases. We will talk endlessly about the best plants for each landscape and garden situation. But with the summer that remains, let’s get back to the actual acts of gardening, for which there is never enough time.

Sally Cunningham is a garden writer, lecturer, and the WIVB-TV (channel 4) gardening expert. She has written Great Garden Companions (Rodale Books) and contributed to many books. She is the project coordinator for the National Buffalo Garden Festival and provides consultation at Lockwood’s Greenhouses in Hamburg. She gardens extensively at home and never has enough time.