My Least-Favorite Gardening Jobs

October 11th, 2022

   As I was finishing off the last few bucketfuls of my most recent 10-yard load of mulch, my back reminded me why I’m not a fan of this labor-heavy activity.

I’d rather have this spread on the ground than be king of the mulch mountain.

   Mulching might be great for discouraging weeds and keeping moisture in the soil, but it’s not much fun.

   “Brutal” better describes it when you have to carry five-gallon buckets of the stuff up steep slopes.

   The experience got me thinking about the gardening jobs that I like a lot better – ones that don’t involve ibuprofen.

   That led me to make a list of 14 gardening jobs and to rank them by how well I enjoy doing each of them.

   That was a worthwhile exercise because as I age, I realize I’m going to have to start reducing, eliminating, or hiring out some of the work. And I’d prefer to start by getting rid of the jobs I don’t like (or have a harder time doing) while hanging onto the jobs I like best for as long as possible.

   Your list might well be very different, but here’s how I rank the 14 jobs – from least favorite to most favorite. I’ll give you my seven least-favorite below and finish up with my seven most-favorite jobs next week.

   14.) Mulching. I like the look of newly mulched beds in addition to the weed-fighting, soil-feeding, and moisture-retaining benefits, but it’s just getting to be too much for an old guy.

   I seem to have a quota of about 100 bends in my back per day these days. Beyond that and it starts to hurt, as if warning me that something bad is going to happen if I don’t knock it off soon.

   Mulching puts me over the 100-bend limit before the first cubic yard is down.

   This is a no-brainer as the first job I’ll hire out.

Read why it always rains five minutes after George gets a mulch delivery

   13.) Emptying the compost bins. Composting is at the heart of good gardening. It’s an important thing to do, and I don’t mind the making part at all.

I shake box after box full of compost to sift it into the garbage can.

   In fact, I’m a “lazy composter” who just piles it up as stuff generates and then lets it rot. In a year, nature has completed its magic.

   That’s when the trouble begins, though. Unfortunately, nature doesn’t magically eject the compost from the bins and apply it over my beds and lawn.

   I have to dig it out of two large bins, returning the semi-composted top stuff to next year’s pile while sifting the good stuff through a screen box I made. This involves a lot of digging, shaking, sorting, lifting, dumping, and spreading – all while sweating and wearing a mask to keep flying organic fragments out of my lungs.

   Nothing beats this black gold for fueling healthy plant growth, and it’s a great way to recycle yard waste and kitchen scraps into something useful. That doesn’t mean I have to enjoy doing it.

Read the post on Composting, George Style

   12.) Troubleshooting. I lump anything that revolves around preventing and dealing with garden troubles into this group.

   For me, that includes such jobs as regularly applying deer repellents, cage-trapping voles, installing assorted netting and spot-fencing to keep animals from eating my plants, spraying copper on the tomatoes to prevent blight, and occasionally spot-spraying weeds.

   I really don’t like buying, mixing, or spraying anything – chemical or otherwise. It’s just too complicated, time-consuming, potentially polluting, and iffy in effectiveness.

   Beyond just the work of it all, I don’t like this whole category of jobs because it reminds me how many things are going wrong in the garden – or will if I don’t act ahead of time.

Read George’s post on the difficulties of determining what’s wrong with plants

   11.) Raking leaves. Leaves have so many great re-uses around the yard that I never just blow them out to the curb. They’re a valuable resource.

Raking isn’t a fun job for me.

   I leave as many leaves as possible where they end up… under trees and shrubs and over perennial beds, for example. I also mow what leaves I can into the lawn.

   However, I have way more lawn than I’d like, and our amply-tree’d neighborhood often produces more fallen leaves than I can mow.

   I could save work with a gas-powered blower. But they make a lot of noise, eat up expensive gasoline, and blow allergens and leaf fragments around (not good for asthma).

   Instead, I use a hand rake to gather excess leaves into piles, then suck them into the bag of my electric leaf vac. The bags of semi-chopped leaves go into the compost, on top of informal paths, over the year-end vegetable garden, and into recycled bags for use as mulch next spring.

   That all helps me make free DIY soil amendments and keep leaves out of the waste stream. That’s the good part.

   The bad part is that what I used to think of as “good exercise” now feels more like back-aching work after about 15 minutes.

Read George’s post on why it makes sense to “leave the leaves”

   10.) Digging/improving soil. Here’s another hard-labor job that involves back-breaking effort (especially in clay soil), plus lugging around bags, buckets, and/or wheelbarrow loads of compost and such.

A lot of digging, lugging, and mixing are involved before I try to plant a bed.

   I’ve done a ton of this the past three years in renovating long-neglected beds and in preparing my atrocious native “soil” for new gardens.

  Thankfully, once gardens are done and planted, this a job that largely goes away on its own. Although it’s tempting to convert even more of my big front lawn to flowers, the fresh memories of sweat and ache from digging bring me back to reality.

Read the latest advice on how to improve soil and plant new plants

   9.) Edging. Cutting fresh bed edges not only makes a landscape look well tended, it creates a lip to keep mulch from migrating out of beds while keeping the lawn from creeping in.

   I’ve tried to limit the back-bending price of this one by edging less often (once a year) and doing it during warm days in the off-season when the turf is soft.

   I still do the deed by hand with a long-handled edger and a bucket to collect the edged-up pieces for the compost pile.

   An electric edger might be a work-saving option, but those pieces are still down on the ground where they threaten my 100-bend limit.

   8.) Watering. Hosing dry soil might not be high on the labor-intensity list, but since our summer weather often goes weeks without a good soaking, watering is a job that can suck up an inordinate amount of time.

   Maybe some people like the idea that watering is a low-energy job that you can do with your brain on autopilot, but I find it mind-numbingly boring and repetitive.

   I also don’t like hauling out the hose and reeling it back in… evening after evening after evening when I’m trying to keep new plantings alive in an unending heat wave.

Read George’s post on why it’s so important to get watering just right

   Check back next week for my seven most-favorite gardening jobs.