Is "Lazy Gardening" a LIE? Is a NO Weed/Water Garden Possible?

Is lazy gardening a lie? Is it actually possible to get nutrient-dense food for your family without ever having to weed or water, without having to spend money on fertilizer and special soils and potions from your garden? Or are all of these videos just clickbait? Let's talk about it. The first principle of lazy gardening is that it's going to save you a whole lot of time. Let's inspect. I've gotten so many comments on my last few videos that say this doesn't look like lazy gardening. You're actually doing a ton of work. And they're not wrong. This isn't actually lazy. In fact, if you're lazy, I don't think I can help you. This is efficient. I'm not going to lie to you. You are going to have to spend a couple of afternoons every year to actually set up your garden correctly, especially in the first couple years. But all the people that see me pushing wheelbarrows of mulch and raking things out and screening mulch aren't thinking about the compounding nature of time. The ultimate goal of everything that we're doing here in our lazy garden, especially in the preparation stage, is setting ourselves up so that we don't have to spend a whole bunch of time in small pockets throughout the gardening season watering and weeding and adding fertilizer and doing the other kinds of things that most gardeners have to do. So if we think about the compounding nature of time, let's just think about, okay, it takes about 15 to 30 minutes a day to water and pull a few weeds in a garden throughout the season. If we say that the season's six months long, that's 180 days. 30 times 180 divided by 60 for the 60 minutes is 90. That's 90 hours of work that we're saving compounded over an entire garden season that we can save with an afternoon or two at the beginning of the season. The next thing that lazy gardening promises is you'll never have to weed your garden again. Let's take a closer look at that. One of the promises of lazy gardening is that you won't have to deal with weeds as much. And that could be thought of as a lie because if you look closely here, there are in fact some weeds in my garden. I mean, this is just a small section and we've got that many weeds already. But your success as a lazy gardener will be in direct proportion to or in correlation with your tolerance level for chaos. If you have some inner need to have an absolutely picture perfect garden that is 100% weed free, you are going to spend a whole lot more time and effort putzing around and dealing with things that don't actually have to be dealt with if our ultimate goal is really just put some seeds in the ground and get food at the end of the season. Because if you can get to the point where you can tolerate a little bit of chaos, you can look past those weeds and you can actually see the things that they're doing for us instead of thinking of them as working against us. There's a common misconception about weeds and where they come from and what they're actually doing that we can kind of examine a little bit looking at this cardboard. The first step of starting a lazy garden is laying down cardboard. That is in fact to suppress the weeds that are actually below it. And that will take care of everything. Depending on how fast the cardboard breaks down in your soil, you shouldn't have any weeds coming back up from underneath the cardboard. But that doesn't actually address where the vast majority of weeds are actually coming from, which is the sky. Most weed seeds are blown in from outside your garden, in the air. They're coming from birds that are flying overhead and pooping in your soil. And those weeds are obviously not going to be avoided by laying down cardboard and mulch. But therein lies one of the biggest misconceptions about what the mulch toppers that we're actually putting on top of our garden beds are doing. Yes, wood is a sponge. It helps to trap all of the moisture that's below the soil from evaporating off the top of the soil as the sun beats down on the soil, which is why we generally have to water our gardens in the first place. Black is a dark color. It collects heat. It makes things evaporate. But when we put a little mulch guard on top, it keeps that water in. It also makes the top layer of our garden beds super, super dry, which is not a great environment for weed seeds that have blown in from elsewhere, been pooped down from birds to actually germinate and grow. Therefore, any little weeds, which you can see there are some coming in here, any little weeds that are growing on the surface of my mulch here, have very, very weak root systems because they haven't germinated very well. And we can fix that literally by just going like this. And in so doing, we're exposing all these little roots right to the sun where they will die in place. There are actually a couple of advantages of leaving weeds in place in our garden. And again, for those of us who are able to tolerate that, we'll talk about that in just a second. But before we do, let's also just talk about what's happening as we just displace these little weeds and then leave them here on top of the soil. We're actually creating another layer of mulch. Any nutrients that these little guys may have absorbed from the soil below or from the mulch around it will actually be left in place and will be absorbed back into the top layer of our garden. So we're actually creating some natural fertilizer from the things that have already photosynthesized before we actually came and planted any seeds that we actually want in this garden. For the lazy gardeners among us that do want a more pristine looking garden, a rake is a fantastic tool to use to kind of scoop up these little weeds and displace them really quickly and easily without actually disturbing the soil below. In doing this, notice how careful I'm being with the rake. I'm actually going over a few plants that I actually planted in this bed and I'm not disturbing them, but I am disturbing whatever little weed seeds have blown in and started to germinate without actually having to sit here and pick those things one by one. For those of us that are able to let go of our OCD a little bit though and actually think about what it might look like to have a garden with a few weeds in it, looking at my strawberry patch here there is actually probably several weeds that I can't even even really see down below here. But one of our greatest tricks as lazy gardeners is to observe what's happening in nature and then replicate it in whatever way we can in our gardens so that we can actually use what happens in nature to our own advantage. And with both weeding and watering, you're actually seeing the results of that right here in my strawberry patch. For almost every variety of plant, whether it's something we want in our garden or a weed that we don't want in our garden, it has to have access to sunlight to be able to truly thrive. That one's too small for my basket. If we can get our garden established to the point that we have this many plants planted in this small of an area in such a way that actually crowds out any other weeds or other plants' ability to get access to the sun so that they can thrive, then we don't actually have to worry about them ever taking over. Which is exactly why as a lazy gardener I decided a long time ago that as I was dealing with all kinds of really persnickety weeds here in Tennessee, I wanted to use strawberries as a cover crop because they would stay in the ground year-round and they would block out all those persnickety weeds' access to the sun. Experienced fruit growers will tell you that using strawberries as cover crop like I am doing here and growing them this close together will actually limit your amount of strawberry harvest to some degree because just like every other plant, strawberries need a ton of access to sun as well. So if there's too many strawberries, you are going to have a bit more of a limited harvest. But in this garden, because I have propagated so many of these strawberry plants so many places, if I lose a few berries along the way, I truly do not care because especially right now I'm picking about 10 pounds of strawberries a day even from this small garden space. I mean literally just look at how many strawberries there are in here. It's kind of insane. The other huge benefit we're getting from these strawberries being this closely planted together is that they are also shading out the soil even more than the mulch ever could and keeping all of the moisture that is below right here in the soil. Which leads me back to my other point about weeds and why we may want them. What you're seeing back there is a lazy garden that I started four and a half years ago and have been adding a little bit more to year after year. It took a while for those strawberries to get established to the point that they actually were shading out the weeds beneath them. What you see here is a lazy garden bed that I started completely from scratch a couple weeks ago so that I could kind of show you the comparisons and contrasts throughout the gardening season of something that's been well established and well maintained over time and something that's just getting its start now. There are very few weeds here that you can see unless you look really closely you can see some starting to sprout right on the soil surface here. And to be totally honest in this bed I have a pretty big inclination to actually want to leave them there simply for the fact that I want their little roots to do what roots do best. These little weeds might grow up and start causing a few problems and if they do in fact do that I'll deal with them then. But if you look a little bit closer over here you'll actually see where there are in fact some weeds already starting to poke up from underneath the cardboard that I didn't actually get secured in very well down there. And so some of the things like this Bermuda grass right here might end up actually causing more of a headache than I might like in this garden bed over time if I don't catch them spreading now and do something about it. One of the things that I would say is a lie about lazy gardening is that you only ever have to do any of this one time and you'll never have to do it again. That's actually due to a pretty huge misunderstanding about how this stuff actually works, what it's actually doing, and again the compounding nature of time. The reality is that depending on the climate that you're what the actual conditions were like, where you started, the kinds of weeds that you're going to have to deal with, all those things come into play with the amount of laziness that we can actually exhibit and get away with. I will say very honestly the first year in that garden back there I dealt with so much crabgrass and other stuff because I had learned how to do a lot of this no dig, no till, back to Eden gardening style stuff back when I lived in Washington state where we don't have weeds like Bermuda grass or crabgrass or pokeweed which gets to be like eight feet tall throughout the garden season. In Washington it's hard to get the things that you want to grow big and tall even to do that, much less weeds that'll do that on their own. This is just a different climate. There are different weeds and different plants here and I've just had to learn to adapt a little differently. The first year in the garden back there the weeds had gotten so bad I didn't use enough cardboard or mulch on my first year garden there and halfway through the garden season I had to come in with my weed whacker through the pathways of the garden to actually get to the plants that I wanted to pick tomatoes from. And so the next season I knew better. I knew that I needed to put three layers of cardboard on my garden pathways instead of just the one but that first year that Bermuda grass did actually do me one huge favor. It's also way hotter here in Tennessee. The sun beats down on the soil like nobody's business here and all of that Bermuda grass actually did the same thing for me that first season as my strawberries are now doing for me now. They shaded out the soil and they helped with my water retention in a huge way. Did it look pretty? Absolutely not. But did I grow piles and piles and piles of produce? Absolutely. So we could say that saying that we have to do this once and it's going to work forever is in fact a lie. We have to do this stuff year after year and it will get better and better. This last season I didn't even have to put cardboard in all the middle rows of my garden because I'd already fixed the Bermuda grass problem and all I needed at that point was to add more mulch to keep adding organic matter to the soil and now here we are. The next promise of lazy gardening is that you'll never have to water again. Let's pull back the covers. I set up this lazy garden bed and planted all these plants in it two weeks ago. We've had 88 degree days, lots of sun, haven't had to water it. That actually worked. Yay, lazy gardening. But these were all starts, not baby little seeds that I was planting for the first time. If I were going to come back through and plant a whole bunch of seeds in this garden, little tender things like lettuce or carrots or anything like that, this being a first year garden bed, I probably would have to come through here and put in some drip tape or come through in the evenings and water it right before I go to bed so that I can get the most out of my watering time and I don't have all the water that I'm watering my plants with evaporate during the heat of the day and all that stuff. Because seeds do actually need water to germinate. The other thing I would want to do if I were planting little seeds here would be to pull the mulch layer back a little bit, not entirely, and then lay those little lettuce or carrot seeds here right on the top of the soil. So many beginner gardeners will plant their seeds too deep and then never see them germinate and this is why. Lettuce and carrot seeds are a lot like grass seeds. Grass actually replants itself by those seeds blowing in the wind and them landing right on top of the soil. No one's tilling those in or pushing them into the soil and causing them to grow. They start sprouting right on that soil surface. So we need to mimic nature in that way and put them right on that soil surface and then keep them nice and moist until they in fact have germinated. At that point we'll then come and push our mulch back up around the edges of the now established plants and now that they have some roots and we've replaced our little mulch layer that will be its sponges and do its job down below, we shouldn't have to come back and water these ever again. But in that first couple weeks when we are trying to germinate little baby seeds we do want to make sure that not only do they have access to the soil that they need to send roots down into, but we need to keep that moist enough for them to actually be able to establish those roots. Over time, especially if you're in a climate that has high humidity like this where it does tend to rain a lot, especially in the spring, you'll be able to get away with watering a whole lot less. And in an established garden like mine, aside from that one time of year when I'm germinating little seeds, I don't ever have to water and that's wonderful for me. But let's not throw the baby out with the bath water just because of that one little technicality. One last thing before we leave this little area here. There are some things that simply aren't going to work in the lazy gardening system. For the sake of the starting a lazy garden bed from scratch video, I planted these eggplants way too early in the season and look what has happened. They've been absolutely decimated by flea beetles, which are avoidable if you want to come in and cover your garden beds with the like white fabric stuff that keeps flea beetles and cabbage moths and things away from your plants. But that is not lazy gardening. And also I hate the way that stuff looks and it's really windy here and I never figured out a way to actually keep it on my bed. So the way that I fixed this was planting things like these that I have now over four years, watch get decimated by flea beetles season after season, is I plant them later in the season when their leaves have enough doubling power from the sun to actually be able to grow enough foliage that they can overcome the initial infestation with flea beetles. And another big aspect of that is having healthy soil, which in a first year lazy garden bed is not going to be nearly as healthy as the soil in the four and a half year old lazy garden beds that have continuously been nurtured over time. But even this is an easy lesson we can take from lazy gardening. The best lazy gardeners are going to be fine having some things fail because some things are going to fail. We have a whole lot more chances for success if we diversify the crops that we're planting and we plant more of what actually works and less of what doesn't work. What's going on, Juni? Do you see something? What do you see, Bubba? When it comes to not having to water our garden as often, wood chips are our greatest asset literally because of the way that a tree grows. When a tree is alive, the tree trunk is basically thousands and thousands of tiny little straws that are sending water from down in the roots where the water is being collected up to the foliage of the tree where the water is actually needed. Once the tree dies, the wood dries out and all of a sudden those sponges are ours for the taking if we want to use them to mitigate our watering needs. So saying that you'll never have to water again, possibly a lie. But at best, over time, and of course this is climate dependent, wood chips will massively if not completely remove your need for watering. At worst, they'll still help and that's great, isn't it? One of the biggest concerns that people have with adding wood chips to their garden is that wood robs nitrogen from the soil. At least that's what pretty much every commenter has told me so far. And that is scientifically kind of true. Wood and other organic matter does require nitrogen to start breaking down, but we're putting those wood chips into our soil in the garden. And it's not actually that the wood is going to steal that nitrogen and it's going to be gone for forever. It's that the wood is temporarily tying up the nitrogen while it breaks down and then it will actually, just like it does with the water, slowly release it back into the soil over time. And that's where soil fertility becomes really, really important. Another thing I got a lot of comments about as I was showing screening my compost in the Start Your Lazy Garden From Scratch video, they said, man, literally none of that. Stirring your compost, screening your compost, wheelbarrowing that stuff around. It doesn't seem lazy at all. It actually seems like a lot of work. And in the moment, yes, it is a little bit more work than just going to the store and buying a bag of bagged compost. And there is absolutely no shame in doing that. The reason that we need to care so much about adding compost to our garden actually directly addresses the concerns about soil fertility, nitrogen uptake, and all that with the wood chips. Because we put a thin layer of nitrogen-rich compost on our soil at the same time that we're adding the wood chips so that there's enough nitrogen to go around. And I think this is a really good time for me to mention that I'm not trying to make clickbaity videos. I'm not trying to show off how much I know about plants. Actually, calling it lazy gardening is really just trying to get the kind of people that this information will help to actually be able to find that information. Nothing that I'm doing here is actually new. Throughout my 12 years doing all this, I've learned so much from Paul Gauci with Back to Eden Gardening. I'm applying no-dig and composting principles that I learned from Charles Dowding. A lot of my garden bed construction looks a lot like hugelkultur gardening. And so many of my tips that actually make lazy gardening work. Things like putting all of our tools in the way, on the way, the placement of those compost bins themselves being right outside the barn where I get the manure to put in the bins, and right next to the garden where I actually use the compost in the first place. Plus the idea of mimicking the forest all comes from permaculture farming principles. The next thing that lazy gardening promises is that we are going to save a ton of money. Let's examine the checkbook, shall we? When it comes to saving money as lazy gardeners, there is a principle that I really love to follow in life. It's that you can have things cheap, you can have things fast, or you can have things easy, but you can't have all three. And I think that applies to pretty much all of lazy gardening, especially when we factor in what it is that we actually want out of this whole ordeal. I talked about the potential benefits of having weeds in our garden because they do provide more root structure that breaks up our soil, they provide more shade that helps us to water less, but if we let them get out of hand then they can potentially compete for sunlight with our plants. At which point a lot of gardeners, especially commercial farmers, would want to come in with some sort of chemical that they could buy to get rid of the weeds. Learning to work with nature instead of against it is not only going to line our pocketbooks with all kinds of products we don't actually end up having to buy for the garden. Whatever initial sacrifices we may make, years one and two, by not applying chemical fertilizers and instead using compost and mushrooms and homemade stuff like this weird potion. Something else I learned from someone else. This is the indigenous microorganism potion that is taught by Korean natural farming. And this disgusting cesspool here is my chop and drop organic fertilizer, which is basically made with rainwater and weeds that I pulled and put into a bucket and a handful of manure that I tossed in here and then let putrefy in the sun for a few weeks. It smells bad, but boy howdy is it good for your plants. All three of these things take time and effort to make, but will ultimately save us hundreds if not thousands of dollars and in the long run will create healthier soil that will make healthier plants that are more disease resistant that can grow bigger and taller without human intervention of any kind. And there again is the compounding nature of time. If we want a quick and easy fix, it's going to cost money. Plain and simple. We can buy all kinds of things to help speed this process along. We can go out and get azomite at the store. We can go out and get trace minerals. We can go out and buy the beneficial nematodes that will help keep the root systems of our plants safe. Or we can take a little bit of time and effort up front. We can create the environment that will over time attract those things itself. I talked a little bit earlier about wood chips and how a lot of people were concerned about them binding nitrogen. And two quick thoughts on that. First, we are not actually mixing the wood chips into the soil at any point. They are an amendment for the sides of our garden pathways and the top of our garden beds. But if you're noticing that you are having fertility issues, especially in years one and two with the wood chips present, add a little nitrogen to your soil. You can do that through the use of this organic fertilizer. You can get a product from Redmond Minerals that I absolutely love called Soil Builder plus Chicken Poop or something like that. There will be a link in the thing down there. But that's a really great instantaneous boost of nitrogen if in fact science does work against you right at the beginning. Which leads me to my next point. I said at the beginning of the video that if you were lazy, I probably couldn't help you. And that's true because if you truly are lazy, you're not going to want to do any of this stuff. You're not going to be able to get over that initial hump of the work that's required to get started. You're not going to have the patience to actually see this through. You're not going to have the stick-to-itiveness enough to get to the point that you can see the compounding nature of all this stuff over time. But the hidden bonuses of gardening like this are that not only does the health and well-being of our soil compound over time, not only do we eventually get healthier, more disease-resistant plants that can grow bigger and stronger without us having to lift many fingers at all, we're also helping the planet. And I'm not going to make you listen to another unintentional TED Talk about mycelium and what can actually happen when we do carbon sequestration. Twelve years ago when I planted my very first garden, I was trying to grow food because so much of our food at that time was coming from the food bank. And that's why food security is such a huge passion of mine. Teaching people how to grow their own food and how to do things themselves so that they're empowered to do it is what we're all about around here. And when I first started, I knew nothing about any of this. But I have catalogued the entire journey from total city slicker to full-time farmer on my Squarespace website, annavaltrades.com. Squarespace is a fantastic resource for someone like me who is not very tech-savvy and spends most of her time outside with animals to very easily drag and drop anything and everything that I want to share with the world into a beautiful artist-designed template that then shares it with the world. Squarespace makes it super easy for me to host an online store where I sell merchandise, project plans, online courses, and I keep everyone updated about what's going on with the School of All Trades that I'm building right here on the farm. So if you have any big ideas that you want to share with the world, check out Squarespace. And when you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com slash annavaltrades for a 10% discount. If you've been watching this channel for very long at all, you know that I'm not lazy. I'm busy. I have a thousand different interests and a thousand things I want to do every day. And learning things like permaculture principles and time management and how to do things efficiently, like garden like this, is what actually allows me to do the other things. We have done a lot of videos the last few weeks about lazy gardening, and that is simply because this is the right time of year to be doing that. And if you're only here for gardening, I'm so glad you're here. Stick around, we've got lots more of that to come. But again, this is Anna of All Trades, not of one trade. We do so much more than gardening here. This actually started as a woodworking channel because that's actually what I do for a living. This is the craft school that I'm building to teach disappearing life skills like woodworking and blacksmithing and fabrication and gardening and canning and preserving and all the things that people 150 years ago would have to know how to do to survive. And one of those rabbit trails that we've gone on with the channel is about my animals. I love these guys so much and I have learned so much from them. If you would like to check out the whole animal crew and hear about a few of the lessons that they've taught me over the years, check out this video. Thank you so much for tuning in. I will see you again next time. Cheers!