12 Low-Maintenance Tweaks for the Lazy Gardener

If you find yourself constantly struggling to find the time to actually get out into the garden, or if you want to make your garden more productive with less effort, or you're just lazy but don't want to go without having a great garden, well these are all problems that I've run into over the last 12 months myself. Ironically, starting a channel about gardening has actually meant I've ended up with less time to actually tend to the garden because my free time I have to choose between either gardening or making videos about gardening. So this year I'm making about a dozen different changes to my garden that will make it easier to look after, take a lot less mental effort to look after, but shouldn't actually sacrifice any real productivity. And I encourage you to steal any or all of these changes for yourself because having other commitments like family or work or school shouldn't mean that you should go without having the ability to grow your own food at home. Now I do need to mention I actually shot this video about a week ago, which is why I'm about to change clothes. And it was originally going to be called here's 12 changes I'm making to my garden this year and you should too. But I realized once I was editing it that they all actually have to do with saving time or making the garden easier to look after or easier for lazy people to get a decent garden. So that's why I've retitled the video that and reshot this intro today. And what I will mention is the whole time I was shooting that video I was racing against the clock because a storm was quickly coming in. But what that does mean for you is if you stick around to the end you'll get a lot of tips really quickly. Alright, now let's dig in. There's one thing I've worked out in the last 10 or so years of growing my own food is that the hobby of gardening is essentially the hobby of just continuously learning and improving with eating a few veggies in between. And that still stands true over the last 12 months. I've still learned so much and made a whole lot of mistakes that I don't want to repeat. And also just thinking about how to actually make my personal garden work better for me with less effort or more production or something like that. So here's a dozen or so things that I'm going to be doing differently this year than I have previously. And most of them will be things that I think will work for you or you just get to learn from my mistakes before you make them yourself. I should mention the garden's probably going to look a little bit sad today because today was a 40 degree day. Right now it's about 36 degrees and there's a thunderstorm coming in quite quickly. So if I suddenly change clothes it's because I had to stop and film tomorrow. Also how good does my new big tomato trellis look? It was my weekend project. Now the first thing I'm doing differently. To understand you need to know that for most of my growing life I was in suburban rentals only really able to grow in containers. Now this is going to be my second year here but this will be the first real year with a fair bit more growing space. Something like 12 actual meters of bed space as well as plenty of room for fruit trees and some other containers and stuff that are around. And so the first thing I'm doing differently is a handful of crops that we actually get through a lot of in the house. I'm just going to be growing a whole lot more of them. Us specifically I'm really going to try and double down this year on garlic, onions, carrots and broccoli. Because previously being so space limited I've just chosen to grow a whole lot of high quick turnover crops with plenty of variety instead of actually trying to grow a really productive amount of only a couple things to really start to cut down on those household costs. But this year it's something I'm going to start really focusing on. The next one is I'm concentrating far more on growing vertically which you can already start to see a lot of evidence of in the garden. There's far more trellises coming around. This big arch piece. I have this great big pyramid here that my cucumbers have been on. This crop of cucumbers is nearly done now. And then of course the nice great big new addition my big tomato trellis which has always been the plan for these garden beds to have this big centerpiece nice greenery back of just eye level tomatoes. Which I do have to work out what to do with for the other six months of the year that I'm not growing tomatoes. If you have any suggestions I'm open to it. But this thing is huge and that extends to the part of the garden that you guys never really get to see much. This year I've been growing hops for the first year which I've wanted to for ages. If you don't know hops is the flour that you use to help flavor beer. They're just starting to bud up now. They'll start coming to the flower over the next week or so. I'll get another shot but they're starting to climb across these festoons that I have here. And I've got a couple of hop plants. I've tried one on the ground and one in a container to see what worked better. The ground is definitely winning. And then I've also got some grape plants or grape vines that have both been taken from cuttings. So this is really just their first year trying to get established. But with the foresight to eventually bring them up and across the entire entrance way to the garden. And because these are all deciduous or well the hops you just cut back. They're going to have that nice natural cooling effect where they're going to help shade the house from the sun in summer. And then during the cooler months the leaves aren't there. So it does help the natural solar energy to try and warm the home a bit. This is one of the first things that I always envisioned doing when I first moved in here. This is the first year that it's actually starting to move along. This year I made one of the biggest garden design mistakes without even realizing. And that is in this far back corner. The furthest farthest back corner of the garden. And also the furthest away from my hose is where I happen to plant my thirstiest crop this year. Which is my cucumbers. And even though I have some irrigation in that bed. Everything else that I've planted in that bed actually doesn't want that much water. A whole lot of alliums that through the early part of summer really want a bit less water. So that they can actually dry off and start that kind of curing process. So they actually store well for many months. And that means that then the half of the bed that the cucumbers are in I should just go and hand water. But because it's so far away I've just inadvertently not watered them anywhere near as much as I should have been this year. So next year that's something that I'm really going to rethink. Because last year my cucumbers were really close. They were nearly the closest thing to the hose. And I changed the location because they'd get a bit more sun in that corner. Without thinking that I accidentally kind of doomed them because I'm lazy. So in future thirstier crops need to be planted near somewhere that it's just convenient for you to water. Because it's always just too easy if you just skip watering for a day. And then skip it for the next day. And then the next day. And then your plants are gone. And as a bonus tip. Because it's not really a veggie garden thing. But a few of you might have noticed that lately my lawn is a whole lot neater than it was in a lot of my old videos. And that's because I've recently gotten a robot lawn mower. And for me it works really well. But there's a whole bunch of pros and cons to these things that really needs its whole own video to help you work out if one of these is going to be right for you. Which is a video that I'm going to make in the next couple weeks or so. So make sure you subscribe with the notification bell on to find out if one of these things is right for you. The next one. And well this is a bit of a bigger problem for me than it will be for you. But I need to build better bed covers. Now there's nothing wrong with the bed covers that I've been using for years. Which is this 19mm poly pipe that is made for irrigation. You put it over some stakes. And then you put bird netting over that. You weigh it down. Or you pin it down. You clamp it to these. And that is super strong. That is super steady. That works super well. The problem for me is that I need to pull that off to make videos so that I can show you what's going on in the garden. Whereas previously I could just kind of leave it on. But what that has meant is that I eventually just stopped putting it back on. Because it's just too much effort. It adds an extra half an hour on to the start and end of each video. Just pulling the nets off. Putting them back on. And so this year I really want to commit to building something that it will just be like whip on whip off. That's some sort of permanent fixed structure that will go on all of the beds. And one thing I really want to do with at least one of these. Maybe both. But I'm going to build a mini poly tunnel that goes over just the tops of the beds. That will use like a clear builders plastic to create essentially a mini greenhouse on one of the beds. So that I can then get about an extra two months into each season of some warmer crops in these beds. That storm is starting to get really ominous. It's getting closer and closer and starting to get pretty dark. Even though there's still about three hours of daylight left. The next thing that I'm doing differently is I want to grow a much healthier mix of slow growing and fast growing crops. Because this year something I talked about on my socials a bit is that in October I had to have an completely unexpected month off gardening. I was in hospital for a little bit. Bedridden for about three weeks after that. And guess what? I came back to my garden and everything that was fast growing like lettuces and stuff were all completely gone and bolted. But we still thankfully had so much going well because I had such a good mix of like onions and garlic and beetroots as well. That if I was growing what essentially my entire garden was 12 months earlier, which is a whole lot of high turnover fast crops, I would have come back to basically everything being dead and having to nearly start the entire garden over again. But this year because I happened to on a whim plant a bunch of slower growing stuff it's gone super well. So when you have a good mix of fast growing and slow growing you have the best of all worlds. Where you have a really high productive garden but then you also have just some really stress-free stuff that you get to just leave in the ground and it will just one day be ready to harvest and then you pull it out and you've got a whole bunch of beetroots and onions and stuff. And I think getting that mix right is essential to actually being able to grow a reasonable amount of food for most people who just have a day job and maybe a couple hours a week to actually get in the garden. So even though you might see those longer seed to harvest times in the back of seed packets or seedling labels, having a good mix of those larger numbers will actually make your gardening life much easier. Working out the best version of succession planting for you and your garden is something that's really important for getting the most productivity out of your garden but it's also something that's really really tricky to do. And it's something that I've been at complete opposite ends of the spectrum of in different parts of my life where I was either had complete spreadsheets on everything, working out weeks and weeks in advance what I needed to start when so that when something was ready to harvest it would come out or just being completely fast and loose and just kind of starting some seeds willy-nilly, wasting a whole lot of seedlings and then hoping stuff would fit in somewhere to the garden. This year what I really want to try and hone in and work out and once I do I'll make it available to everyone is my own version of if I could write on one piece of paper my entire year's worth of succession planting or at least 80% of it in a really really easy to follow and simple format, what is that? And what I think that's going to take the shape of is just one guide of one month's seed cell where I plant something like four broccoli and four lettuce and four beans and one cabbage, one cauliflower, something like that that I start once a month every two weeks or three weeks and then I just have a couple of modifications of that for a few different parts of the year so that essentially all I need to do is once every fortnight a month pour that out start that new lot of seeds that I can probably actually get ready ahead of time so it takes even less work out of it and that way I actually get to keep a really really productive garden without having to do a whole lot of fall planting. Something that I want to grow a whole lot more of this year because I hadn't tried them until this year and I'm just blown away by them are these dwarf long beans that don't actually need a trellis to support them and you get essentially mini long beans and these aren't even going to be the best example because I definitely underwatered this container over the last couple months, ironic as it's raining, but I think these are going to become one of my go-to garden fillers of what to put when I don't know what to do with the space especially because they're so fast growing they're so hardy you just chuck them in and the bean pods themselves well you can just freeze them super easily and then pull them out and use them when you need them. This year I'm really going to be doubling down on just starting these all the time and I'm going to probably almost use these as a cover crop in some parts of my garden. This year I'm going to be ignoring containers or at least smaller containers as much as possible and I'm really going to try and consolidate everything into garden beds or if I do have to grow it in a container it's going to be the biggest possible because having so many individual containers is just creating too much overhead of the amount of watering that you have to do especially because all the small ones individually don't hold that much water. I'm nearly watering this little part of my yard as much as I a lot the whole rest of my garden beds and the stuff's still just not getting enough so this year small containers are out. This year I'm going to respect irrigation a lot more. This is the first year that I've had the majority of my garden irrigated and it's helped a lot except that this bed's part of irrigation that happens to irrigate my tomatoes a lot of my brassicas and my little herb garden. I didn't realize but for probably a month and a half there was actually a disconnect in the line so that most of this stuff just hasn't been getting watered and it took me far too long to realize. I did a whole lot of top-up hand watering on these tomatoes because they kept just looking so dry and I couldn't work out why until I actually had to dig some posts over there in the inbed soil and realize that the whole thing's completely dry even though it's been getting watered most days. So this year I'm going to be actually doubling down on increasing my amount of irrigation but paying it so much more respect and making sure that it's working so much more often because this year I really got burnt by it. And the next thing I'm doing is thanking my Patreons very much for supporting the channel. Please consider checking it out if you want to help keep this channel rolling. 100% of it just gets pumped back into making cool content and I have so many cool ideas and just about the only limitation is the cost of making videos so anything you do to help out will really help bring you better gardening content. But one thing I've really learned my lesson on this year is it's so much better to do lots of small improvement projects one after the other instead of trying to do large sweeping changes to your yard all at once. A perfect example is this bed which plan A of this was to turn this into a nice little herb bed very close to the back door. Gets kind of enough sun but the biggest problem, the biggest bugbear that I've run into at this place is that all of the garden beds by the previous owners are just covered in these white pebbles and I'm at this point probably about 200 hours into moving rocks. Many of the prime real estate garden beds that I really want to use are still just covered in them and what my original plan was was to remove all the rocks off all the beds so that I could then go around and mulch and actually plant them and it just doesn't work out. It's too much work so instead as the storm really starts to pick up so instead what I've worked out is much better to do is I just clear away only about a square meter at a time. I plant out that little bit, get that actually growing. That was a big one, that was close. Plant out that one spot, actually get it growing, improve the soil, mulch it well and then once that little section is complete then go and work on the next most valuable section to work on instead of even trying to clear off just this whole little bed which probably would take about another two to four hours to try and get this soil all good. Or I spent about a half an hour clearing away enough rocks to plant one thing and then plant it and then I actually have stuff growing so a whole lot more small improvements. You'll actually see more progress than trying to do a couple of major improvements that just drag out and take too long. Alright the storm is well and truly here. This video might be a little bit choppier than normal so apologies if it was because I had to really rush at the end but YouTube actually thinks that this video is the one will help out your garden the best. Thank you very much, I'll see you next time.