A hard summer for gardening.
I can't keep up with anything gardening wise. Have you been able to?
It’s been quite a while since I’ve felt like I couldn’t keep up with my garden in the summer. Sure, there might have been some weak points throughout the season but I would have generally been on track with weeding and keeping things trimmed up and looking somewhat tamed. This season? I honestly haven’t felt like I could be bothered!
Do I blame the oppressive heat or do I blame other factors? It’s been slowly creeping in but I suddenly feel like I can’t maintain or have the energy to do the amount of work I used to do outside. I’ve been dealing with some health issues this summer that I’m still trying to get answers for (doctors love scheduling you two months out for things that need immediate attention) so I’m hoping I can put a lot of the blame on that for this year.
However, I don’t think I’m the only one struggling. I’ve noticed many in various social media outlets lamenting the heat and inability or lack of desire to do much gardening. Several years ago I would come home from work at lunch, in the summer, and change clothes (or not) and head out to the garden to pull weeds on my lunch break. If I was dripping in too much sweat after thirty or forty minutes I’d jump in the shower before I went back to work. Now? On the days I haven’t been going to physical therapy for my hip or working through lunch to make up hours, I will go home and hibernate inside, either doing chores or watching a streaming service.
Every time I walk from my front door to my car I will pause and look at how unkempt the garden appears. Weeds are everywhere. I see areas I need to thin, places to add in plants. In several spots I’m close to putting in a couple native shrubs and an aggressive native groundcover and calling it done. Part of it is that we’re tired of battling deer. We’ve gone through the rigmarole of trying this plant or that plant to see what they will and won’t eat and it leaves us with a fairly limited palette of plants we can purchase seeds or starts of. And we’re already growing most of those. My small native bed out in the edible garden has inspired Chris and eventually, in the fall when we finish the perimeter beds out there, he’s planning his own native plant section. A place the deer can’t touch.
That’s where I’ve spent most of my energy this summer, inside the fenced edible garden. We had a really great tomato season, which I plan to write about soon. The best season we’ve had in many years! And my native bed out there has been a fun learning experience, trying to juggle plants in a small space and understand who is going to overtake who. I spend my time watering out there and then another 10-15 minutes pulling weeds and I call it quits. Every now and then I’ll spend a few hours making more progress, such as weeding the strawberry and blackberry bed and putting down pine straw, or what I did last week, taking down the spent tomatoes, throwing down some fresh organic fertilizer and covering it with pine straw.
The rest of it? I just can’t be bothered. I’ve been dreaming about cooler weather since June, thinking about late September and early October and the seasonal shift. Is it aging or is it climate change, or both?
I’d love to hear how you are holding up this summer. Are you able to keep up with gardening tasks? How have you adjusted your own goals and priorities? Tell me about your successes and failures in the comments below or hit reply to this email and tell me!
Misti writes regularly at Oceanic Wilderness and On Texas Nature and can be found on Instagram at @oceanicwilderness. She hosts two podcasts, Orange Blaze: A Florida Trail Podcast, and The Garden Path Podcast.
This is the third post this week I have read on this subject. You are not alone. Check out Turtle Paradise or Sowing Words. We are fortunate to have cool dry mornings in the PNW and I am off most of the summer, so I live a spoiled gardening existence. But I’m learning to embrace mess in my garden and in my home and notice beauty instead. There are always going to be weeds and if I have but a few moments, maybe instead I should spend it looking at the swallowtail. It sounds like your body is saying it needs rest as is your brain. Thinking about limitations and climate change is a lot too hold. Not sure if you saw but Janisse Ray is offering an earth journaling class. I’m not sure it will work out for my schedule, but I might try.
I’m new to vegetable gardening this summer and had gusto in May/June and then July came with sheeted days of stagnant heat followed by violent late-day thunderstorms. The mosquitoes bombard you in droves when stepping outside. Nature won, I say. I’m harvesting what I can and letting plants go to seeds ... my fall planning is modest and I’m allowing myself to lower expectations. all to say that this article resonates with me! You’re not alone!