Our favourite gardening shortcuts
Relax and enjoy your garden more this year! Melissa Mabbitt shares her top five gardening time savers
Relax and enjoy your garden more this season, with a few timely techniques to make life easier
1 Make watering a doddle
Watering precious plants is a necessity in summer – unless they’re drought-tolerant species. Rather than make watering a daily chore, change your technique so you always water in the evening and then, really drench the soil. This way you can water every few days rather than daily.
Keep containers near the tap. Don’t put thirsty plants in a place that’s hard to reach – keep them near an outdoor tap so you spend less time lugging a hosepipe or watering can round the garden. Install a drip system. Containers and hanging baskets require daily watering in hot weather, so reduce their number if you can and install a drip irrigation system (see below). Avoid terracotta. Shy away from porous clay pots, which dry out fast, and use good quality plastic or resin ones instead.
Rethink the lawn
If you have a large lawn, mowing can easily take up every summer weekend. Reducing the size of your lawn, either by making flower borders deeper or creating more paved and gravelled areas, helps to speed up the chore. Make a meadow. Put a pause on mowing and let the lawn grow into a meadow for part of the year. Depending on the grass varieties that dominate, it might become lumpy rather than lush, at least initially. For a more attractive result in the long run, take some time now to plant wildflower plug plants into the lawn such as cow parsley, red campion and ox-eye daisies, with daffodils, fritillaries and other spring bulbs. Over time, the taller grasses will become dominant and you’ll finally have a low-maintenance meadow. You’ll need to cut it just once a year in August or September when the wildflower seeds have dispersed, using a strimmer or shears Mow a neat path for access. In long grass, this will retain a sense of order. Replace the grass. Meadows look beautiful, but they’re not a surface for sitting or playing on. Another option is to replace your grass with a tough mat-forming plant such as thyme or creeping chamomile.
3 Choose low-maintenance plants
If you want a garden that takes care of itself, a sure-fire way to save time is to grow plants that love the site and soil you already have. This is the ‘right plant, right place’ principle and means you have to be strict about choosing only those species that will thrive in your garden’s existing conditions. This way you’ll spend less time replacing or coddling plants that underperform. For instance, if your soil is sandy and freedraining, plant Mediterranean species that tolerate drought. If your soil is damp, choose moisture-loving astilbes and hostas. Reduce staking. Choose upright-growing plants such as echinacea, penstemons and phlox that stay erect without fiddly supports. Plant fewer cultivars, in larger numbers. This way the plant groups become self-supporting. When they need cutting down you can go in with the shears or even a hedge trimmer to fell the lot in an instant, rather than faffing around carefully with secateurs. Pick slow plants. Choose slow-growing evergreen shrubs such as euonymus and pittosporum. They’ll require less pruning and will look great all year round.
4 Spend less time weeding
Weeding little and often is the traditional approach to keeping a weed-free garden, but there are other options. Whenever you create a new planting area in spring or summer, leave the earth uncovered for a few weeks before planting so that any weed seeds can germinate. Hoe them off and you’ll have a clean slate to work with. Spray first. Get rid of perennial weeds before they mingle with herbaceous plants and shrubs. Use a glyphosate spray before planting your new border, and give the soil a rest for a few weeks to ensure the weeds have gone for good. Pack in the plants. Bare ground is a haven for weed seedlings, so pack plants together when planting, and weeds won’t get a look in. Lay a mulch. A thick 10cm (4in) mulch of gravel, bark or compost around plants should stop weed seeds germinating. For a more thorough approach (that can impede later plantings) lay a permanent weed-suppressing fabric membrane on the soil surface first.
5 Take a no-dig approach
Having a veg plot usually goes hand in hand with digging, which is heavy and slow work if you have clay soil. To make the job easier, invest in raised beds. These allow the soil to drain more easily in winter – which in turn makes digging and weeding easier. Use the ‘no-dig’ method. This involves simply laying a mulch on the soil surface then leaving it to break down naturally. Worms will do all the hard work for you! Make the beds by laying wet cardboard over the top of the ground and piling compost, leafmould and manure directly on top. After a few weeks the whole lot will disintegrate into a rich, workable mix. Grow ‘bombproof’ perennial crops. These include rhubarb, globe artichokes, chives, sage and marjoram. Autumn raspberries are one of the simplest fruits to grow, just cut all their canes down in winter and let them regrow in spring and summer – they don’t even need a support.