It’s hard to believe that meaningful amounts of gardening can be accomplished in just 20 minutes. If there’s a trick, it’s learning to imagine what you can get get done and not over extending yourself. In the interest of transparency, Jan and I have started this series of posts about what 20 minutes looks like.

BEFORE:

The gravel path at the entrance to our garden from the back porch, shown au naturel

A path is not a bed and to my way of thinking, it shouldn’t need weeding. But it does. The previous owner had this nice, snaking path installed, with a good dense subfooting and pea gravel on top. If it was a bed, I could mulch it, like the bed seen to the right of the picture, and most weeds would be discouraged. Once the season starts, foot traffic will discourage most weeds but right now, those diligent weeds have taken root and have grown.

I have a special technique for weeding the gravel beds. I pull the large weeds out normally. The roots largely penetrate only a couple inches or so. For the others, I rake my fingers through the gravel briskly dislodging their tiny roots. For the most part, these smaller weeds accumulate in my fingers and I can remove them easily. The trouble is that my fingertip start to tingle after a few minutes work. Truth be told, I didn’t make it even a whole 20 minutes. Sure, I could have found gloves… and as I scrubbed the dirt off my hands and scraped it from underneath my fingernails, but I didn’t.

AFTER:

The gravel path entrance after “20-ish” minutes of weeding.

Not much to say, other than I like how it’s coming along. A bit more tomorrow, perhaps.

It’s hard to believe that meaningful amounts of gardening can be accomplished in just 20 minutes. If there’s a trick, it’s learning to imagine what you can get get done and not over extending yourself. In the interest of transparency, Jan and I have started this series of posts about what 20 minutes looks like.

BEFORE:

The “Wedge” bed shown au naturel

The “Wedge” bed is bounded on the north by a gravel path, on the south by a raised stone bed and on the east by a flagstone circle. We name our different beds because noting different “zones” allows us to alternate our attentions during the growing season. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by ALL there is to do in a garden but by dividing the space into distinct regions and assigning each region a day of the week is a trick to keep from getting frazzled.

Like most of our beds, we mulched heavily last fall with leaves. We even steal leaves from our neighbors for this purpose. The bed would have been over-run with weeds by this point otherwise, I suspect. I had stashed some of our home-made tomato cages in the raise bed area so I had to extricate them as I weeded. Those with good eyes will be able to detect several varieties of edible weed that I didn’t bother to save. However, I rescued a clump of self-seeded dill by the edge of the flagstone circle. Some other day, I’ll likely transplant it over to the raised stone bed.

AFTER:

The “Wedge” bed shown after 20 honest minutes of work

Not much more to say. I loaded the weeds on our drying pile, where we’ll let them wilt in the sun for a few days before adding them to our compost. Once the season gets going, that is, once the plants are in and the beds are well-mulched, I’ll likely leave the weeds on top of the mulch. The only notable exception is bindweed, our current bane, which is treated with extreme prejudice and removed to the trash.