Five ways to make gardening easier

A garden vignette can be as simple as using a watering can as a focal point to draw your eye to a lovely planting.

Gardening should be a joy not a chore

Depending on how busy you are, how much time you want to spend in the garden or how large your garden is, finding time to keep it looking its best can be a real challenge.

Here’s an idea, and it just happens to be my number one tip on how you can make gardening easier – Stop trying to create the perfect garden aesthetic.

Instead, create garden vignettes that make you happy and are easier to maintain. It might be a destination sitting area in the back of the garden, a lovely piece of art, or a small, colourful garden around a lovely bird house.

In our garden, vignettes include natural tree branches and stumps that give wildlife perfect places to perch, a sitting area where we can enjoy an open fire, a Japanese-inspired mini-garden leading into the backyard from the front of the home.

A piece of art such as this ceramic piece of art from Fish in the Garden can create a focal point and vignette in your garden.

In the great scheme of things, the perfect garden is not important. Visitors will remember the exquisite garden vignette you have created more than the overall look of the garden.

It’s not important to friends and family and it’s certainly not important to the wildlife that either drop in for a visit or choose to live their lives in your garden.

In fact, for the wildlife, a little messy is okay. A lot messy is even better.

Wildlife will reward you

Case in point: we have a couple of wild turkeys who seem to have chosen our backyard for their winter roosting area. Besides the bird seed that is either sprinkled on the ground for them or drops from the regular bird feeders, I continually catch them working the seed heads from our native Northern Sea Oat grasses left standing throughout the winter.

This, of course leads me to my second tip on making gardening easier. Stop tidying up the garden in fall. In fact, you can even refrain from most garden tidying if you are willing to let nature take its course. There are no gardeners cleaning up in the forests, grasslands or other wild places around us. Nature knows what to do if we give it a chance and accept a little mess in spring and fall.

By leaving the garden to go a little wild, you will get more visits from local wildlife.

It goes without saying that leaving the leaves should be a primary goal. Leave them where they fall, or rake them onto your garden beds. Cleaning up fall leaves is not only a never-ending job, it’s a waste of time and one of the contributing factors behind the decline of so many of our native butterflies, moths, fireflies and other important insects. It’s also depriving our soil of important ingredients like organic matter and trace minerals.

Even without the seed from the feeders, these turkeys – as well as many of the traditional songbirds – would be flocking to the backyard to eat the natural seed remaining on this native grass. Recently I watched them working the seeds on the brown fern stalks that remain all winter. These natural food sources are vital for the survival of these magnificent birds throughout the winter.

But the seed heads feed a host of animals in the garden from songbirds, to larger animals from our friendly red squirrels to mice that are food for our neighbourhood fox families and screech owls that also need a source of food during our long winters.

The Goldfinches are regular visitors to our dried Black Eyed Susan flower heads.

Adding the native cardinal flower will reward you with hummingbirds and other backyard wildlife from butterflies to hummingbird moths.

Explore the world of native perennials

This leads into my fourth tip: Begin transitioning from primarily using annuals in the garden to depending on the beauty and ease of perennials as the main backdrop for your garden. Whenever possible, use native varieties that are more hardy and adapted to the conditions in the garden.

Keep most of the annuals for containers and hanging baskets and focus on hardy native perennials that not only come back each year with the least fuss, but also spread willingly throughout the garden creating free plants that will eventually act like a living mulch.

Speaking of mulch, it is one of the key ingredients to creating an easy-to-maintain garden.

Here various stone was used to create a non-organic mulch that allows black mondo grass to shine as it grows up through it.

Mulch can be your best garden helper

My final tip is to ensure your garden beds are covered with a thick layer of mulch – either organic or non-organic like pea gravel or river rock.

If you are just starting out on your garden adventure, plan on ordering truck loads of natural mulch to cover your garden beds. Your soil will thank you over time and you will significantly reduce the number of weeds in your garden.

Shredded cedar mulch is my chosen method, but I have also readily dumped natural (free) mulch from tree-cutting companies in parts of my garden as well.

And, while you can purchase mulch on a regular basis to keep a thick blanket covering your soil, a better goal is to use a living, natural mulch of ground covers to get the job done. Purchasing mulch can get expensive, and it requires a lot of time to spread every couple of years.

Creeping phlox forms the perfect ground cover in the front of the garden where it is quite sunny. In shadier areas, use wild geranium, wild ginger or a variety of ferns to form a ground cover.

By planting native ground covers, you can achieve the same results naturally. There are many to choose, from aggressive ground covers like Virginia Creeper a native vine that can quickly cover the ground in a woodland garden, to a less aggressive native plant such as wild geranium.

Another favourite of mine is to use a tapestry of ground covers that form a beautiful tapestry of colour and texture as the various ground covers weave in and out and around one another.

Covering the floor of your garden with native ground covers will take time. Meanwhile, keep the commercial mulch topped up and before you know it you’ll need less and less shredded cedar mulch and you’ll have more time to enjoy your garden and the wildlife that it attracts.

Finally, if all of these tips still means your garden is too much work, consider doing what I did and find someone who sees and shares your garden vision and hire them to help you enjoy your garden to its fullest rather than see it as a constant chore.