Easy Garden Ideas for the Harried Gardener

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Your kids, while scruffy, are alive and well-fed. Your garden, on the other hand, would be dialing 911 if it had fingers. How is it that you can keep human children alive—complex, needy, multi-faceted creatures that they are—while you can’t make a patch of pansies survive the summer? Mamas, you need an easy garden.

The answer? It’s difficult to nurture your garden properly while little people are nipping at your heels and latching onto your nipples.

What busy moms need are plants that do one of two useful things: take care of themselves, or amuse the kids. Pint-size gardeners love to watch things grow, and can be motivated to weed and water if sufficiently captivated. They can even grow their own gardens if they enjoy helping out with the backyard.

2 Tips for an Easy Garden that Won’t Die

1. Choose plants that thrive on neglect.

Turns out what’s good for mom is good for the environment too. Xeriscape gardening is about designing your flowerbeds to use very little water, so you can appear virtuous instead of just lazy. Incorporate river stones, landscape rocks, and walkways, then install drought-resistant plants like English lavender, ornamental grasses, and natural wildflowers.

2. Mulch, mulch, mulch.

A well-mulched garden suffers less moisture loss and so gets by on less hose time. Mulch is also a great natural weed-blocker. You can use wood chips, bark, pine needles, or shredded leaves. Or plant easy-care groundcovers like periwinkle, lily-of-the-valley, thyme, or spotted dead nettle (not as menacing as it sounds).

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1 Comment

  1. Sherissa Microys on May 19, 2022 at 11:34 pm

    Great ideas and the benefits of a garden are extensive, except periwinkle and lily of the valley are invasive and you will regret it later when it kills other plants are keeps going. There are many great alternatives for low ground covers such as creeping phlox, running euonymus or wild strawberry and wild ginger. For a spring bulb with dainty white flowers, one can plant giant snowdrops instead.

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