HOW TO GARDEN (WHEN YOU DON’T HAVE TIME TO GARDEN)
by Katie Palm As I write this, I look out my window and my perennial garden is covered in two feet of snow - and more is falling! The vision of my early bulbs peeking out of the ground seems like a dream that won’t ever arrive. But, like all seasons, this winter too will pass and before I know it, I will be out prepping my garden for spring. Everyone approaches their garden with different priorities. Some prefer a hands-on method that creates a perfectly manicured vision. Others find beauty in the wild untamed-ness of letting your garden grow as it wants. I find I am a "time gardener" - I only make it into the garden when I have the time, which isn’t as often as I would like. This means that my spring cleanup may be the only attention I give my plants for several weeks. Here are my favorite tips for starting your garden off right, even when you can’t devote as much time to it as you’d like:
LEAVE THE DEER FENCE UP. One of the first lessons I learned when I started gardening in the Catskills was that deer love just about any green shoots that appear in a perennial garden. I think they consider my flower bed their personal salad bar! If you want to have beautiful plants earlier in the season, keep that deer fence up until there is plenty of food for the deer out in the woods.
DON’T CLEAN UP. Leave the dead plant material in the fall. I leave seed winter protection for overwintering insects. It is quite common for our family to spot wooly bears crawling out of the remaining plant material on a warm spring day. Because I am a time gardener, I often find that I am cleaning out the dead plant material after the new shoots have started to appear. Rather than feel like I am slacking on my gardening duties, I tell myself that I have protected those early shoots from late frosts. 6
2021 SENSE OF PLACE
PHOTO: SARAH MCGINNIS
heads for migrating and winter birds. The dead leaves and stems provide
