10-Minute Garden Mindset

let the plants do the work for you

The 10-minute garden mindset is about creating a habit of showing up every single day. Some days you will spend much more than 10 minutes. It’s a commitment to yourself and nature, that you’ll spend at least 10 minutes each day growing your own food. 

In the 10-minute garden series I am sharing ways to make gardening more efficient for our busy lifestyles and prevent our sanctuary from turning into our source of burnout. 

It’s the second half of April. The sun is out, at least for us in Columbus, Ohio. I’m impatiently refreshing the monthly forecast and fighting the internal battle to plant stuff out or wait until May. It can take quite a long time to sow all the seeds and transplant all of our plants in our approximately 1,000 square foot garden. It takes weeks to get fully planted. I’m more anxious about it this year than in the past. I think I’m just eager to be barefoot in the garden harvesting tomatoes and peppers and cucumbers and dill and basil and lettuce and and and for dinners. 

Today’s topic of focus for the 10-minute garden mindset is “let the plants do the work for you”. I have recently taught garden planning workshops at our local libraries and kept finding myself use this phrase in answering different questions about why I plan and plant a certain way in the garden. I didn’t even realize that it had become such a huge part of our garden strategy. 

You can plan your garden in a way that reduces the overall work you have to physically do to produce the same goals. Use plants to your advantage and allow them to benefit the garden in ways beyond the harvest and filling your belly. You’re going to plant and harvest them anyways, so why not do so intentionally to take an item or two off your to-do list? Here are some specific examples from this year’s garden plan: 

Smart Seasonal Crop Rotation

• In the spring we plant peas. We string up a trellis or two to support the winding mess of peas as they grow. When we get to the last few weeks of harvesting peas, usually in early June, we direct sow cucumbers in the same spot. This not only helps to bridge the gap but it reduces our labor. When the peas are done we can chop and drop them, removing them from the trellis. At this time the cucumbers are just big enough to start clinging to that same trellis. In August we can plant pole beans at the base of the cucumbers and repeat this same cycle. Three plants in the same spot, using the same trellis across the entire garden season with minimal effort on our part. 

• Our best carrots have grown in loose soil. After making this observation we started using a pitch fork (ideally we’d use a broadfork but we don’t have one) to loosen the soil before planting them. It’s not a lot of effort, but all of these garden tasks take time and it adds up. I realized that the dates line up perfectly to plant some fall carrots when we harvest potatoes. The act of harvesting potatoes is really the same as using a broadfork to loosen the soil, and it’s something we need to do anyways. So we plant carrots in the potato bed as soon as they’re harvested. 

Mulching

• Chop & Drop! As we continue through our spring harvest we will quickly become overwhelmed with summer crops, succession planting and…WEEDS. Allow your spring crops to create ground cover as a green mulch in your garden by using the chop and drop system. This benefits the soil in more ways than just mulching to prevent weeds and retain water, but also by not pulling up plant roots we are allowing soil structure to stay in tact. To use this method simply cut a dead or dying plant at it’s stem right at the soil and drop the remaining parts of the plant on top of the soil. They’ll do no harm by sitting there atop the soil and can be turned in later in the season when there’s nothing growing in the garden bed. Be careful of dropping seeds as plants will grow. Maybe you’ll decide this is a good thing, but I figured I’d remind you!

Succession Planting

• Choose varying varieties of the same crops instead of choosing just a single variety to grow. This will help naturally spread out your harvest for the same amount of work and planning because different varieties will mature at different rates. Here are a few examples: 

  • Beets:

    • Early wonder: 45 days

    • Detroit Red: 60 days

  • Broccoli:

    • Sweet Bunch: 25 days (from transplant) (mini variety)

    • Belstar: 65 days (from transplant)

  • Cabbage:

    • Chinese variety (similar to napa): ~50 days

    • Round head variety: ~95 days

  • Cauliflower:

    • Snow Crown: 50 days

    • Paxton: 67 days

Perennials

• Once established perennials are some of the best producing and lowest maintenance plants you can have. We have hesitated to delve deep into perennials because we are constantly on the verge of uprooting, but have come around to the low-maintenance allure of perennials. This year we are planning to add a few more apple trees, we converted two beds to a strawberry patch, and we are planting a ton of perennial herbs and medicinal plants. 

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I’d love to hear some ways in which you apply this mindset - let the plants work for you!

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