My Most-Favorite Gardening Jobs
October 18th, 2022
Last week I zeroed in on my list of gardening jobs that I’m not too crazy about doing – the ones that will be the first that I farm out as age forces me to scale back.
I really don’t mind weeding that much. It’s like harvesting compost.
This week it’s time to look at the seven jobs that I like most – in order from “least-most” to “best-most,” starting with…
7.) Weeding. Like watering, this is another job that isn’t particularly heavy labor and can be done on autopilot. My mom actually liked weeding best of all gardening jobs.
On the plus side, weeding removes competition from the “real” plants and makes a garden look so much better. I also like to think of weeding as “harvesting” compost. It’s a way to turn your enemy into an asset.
On the down side (literally), weeds usually require you to go down there after them – bad news for my 100-bend back quota. And if you don’t mulch or fill all space with your own plants, the weeds keep coming and coming and coming.
I’ve been compromising lately by spending more time with my long-handled Winged Weeder, which at least lets me slice off most weeds without bending.
Read George’s post on Winning the Weed War
6.) Pruning trees and shrubs. I like the idea and process of cutting selected branches off of trees and shrubs. It’s art in a way, and it’s helpful to the growth and look of these long-term, high-profile garden plants.
Things turn out so much better and so much more satisfying with well timed and well done prunings… not to mention being far less expensive than hiring a crew with chainsaws.
The parts I don’t like are occasions when I have to get up on a ladder (a danger even for non-old-guys) and when the job generates a lot of removal with the subsequent pick-ups and lug-arounds.
5.) Mowing. Since I ended up with so much lawn, I broke down and bought a riding lawn mower – something I never thought I’d do.
A yard job that’s not too back-breaking…
Yeah, mowing is largely mindless like watering and weeding, but driving around on a small tractor adds some sort of inherent amusement. Or maybe it’s a throwback to my favorite Hersheypark ride when growing up – the Miniature Turnpike.
Running the push mower around the trees and bed edges isn’t nearly as much fun, but I figure the riding mower is one of the last yard jobs I’ll be giving up.
Read George’s tips on the right way to mow
4.) Harvesting. We’re getting into the real fun stuff now. I’d have to rate picking fruits, vegetables, and flowers as the most satisfying part of gardening.
So much can go wrong between seed and harvest that it’s a major accomplishment to successfully create (with nature’s help) a juicy red tomato or a red beet the size of a baseball.
Harvesting also means you get to eat tastier, more nutritious, and less expensive produce than you can buy at the store. That’s a good payoff for the effort, too. Yum.
See George’s list of when and how to harvest different vegetables
3.) “Primping.” I lump the whole array of garden-neatening jobs into this category – deadheading the flowers, staking floppy perennials, snipping off errant or too-long shoots, picking off dead leaves, and so on.
Doing a little leisurely snipping on one of my five-gallon-bucket patrols.
These are the kinds of things I like to do at a leisurely pace as time allows throughout the season. None of them involve heavy labor. Just some light to moderate bending.
I look at these jobs more as “puttering” – good if and when I can do them but not a big deal if and when I can’t.
And they all make the garden look much better in exchange for the limited output.
2.) Transplanting. You’d think transplanting plants would score pretty low, especially if you see it as “fixing a mistake” that you should’ve avoided in the first place.
I don’t see it that way at all. I look at transplanting as a creative process akin to editing.
Just as writing gets better when you change words or move paragraphs around, so does a garden get better when you move a plant to a better location.
Sometimes a move will help a struggling plant revive. Sometimes a move is needed to reconcile space conflicts in gardens that are constantly growing. But most often for me, moves are design choices when I see that a particular plant is going to look better next to a plant that’s blooming at the same time somewhere else or next to a new plant that I’ve just added.
One of my favorite parts of gardening is looking around the yard and assessing whether each plant is in the best place or whether it would look or do better elsewhere.
I make myself lists and do regular transplanting sessions – usually one in the early spring and another in the early spring. Despite the work, the creativity makes me actually look forward to my games of “musical plants.”
Most plants transplant better than most people think, by the way, and replanting is easier since I’ve already improved the soil during the original plants.
Read George’s post on why so many gardeners are afraid to move a plant
1.) Planting. Even more creative than transplanting is deciding what to plant in the first place – and then doing it. It’s my favorite-of-all part of gardening.
Planting seeds with my grandson.
I like creating even more than the nurturing that gardening involves. Nothing beats picking out new flowers or new vegetables and then putting the seeds and plants into the ground.
Planting is anticipation. It’s hope. It’s art. It’s an answer to curiosity. And more tangibly, it’s the road to a lot of really good salads and beautiful flowers.
Planting bigger trees and shrubs involves more work than veggies, annuals, and perennials, but I still even like doing that.
Every season is going to be different, and I like that, too.
I agree with whomever said that gardeners are the eternal optimists, that no matter how many hail storms, late frosts, or Japanese beetles you run into, a gardener fully expects next year to be better.
It’ll be a sad day for George if/when he can’t get out there in May to plant a tomato.