As a busy stay-at-home mom, you don’t always have as much time as you’d like to tend your plants, mow the lawn, and complete other green-fingered tasks. Because of this, it’s best to organize your gardening with free pockets of time and optimize how you do the gardening to avoid it becoming too much to handle.
Here are five time-saving gardening tips to get you started.
Use Planter Bags for Contained Veggie Growing
While you may not have space or time to manage a large vegetable patch, one way around the problem is to use planter bags instead. These provide a free-standing vegetable pot that’s more manageable. For example, a tomato plant not only brightens up the area as the tomatoes ripen, but they also can supplement a salad too.
Emptying out a planter bag is easier than a plant pot or plant container. They can also be adjusted to different heights to hold the appropriate level of soil for different vegetables or plants.
Choose Plants Carefully
When you’re stuck for time, you’ll be glad that you focused on perennial plants and ones described as evergreen. The main advantage to these is they bloom each year without the need to be replanted annually. This saves considerable time and is also easier on your back too!
Wi-Fi Enabled Moisture Sensors
Wi-Fi enabled moisture sensors can hook onto existing sprinkler systems to moderate the amount of water fed to the sprinklers and when it’s cut off. The more sophisticated ones will pull up reports on rainfall to avoid overwatering when there’s been plenty of rain already. There are systems from Nest, Green IQ, Edyn, and PlantLink that provide the electronics and connectivity options to achieve these results.
For potted plant owners, special plant sensors that slot into the plant’s soil directly measure the soil’s moisture levels. Depending on the system, these plant sensors can alert you by SMS, email, and other forms of messaging when a plant needs more water. Some systems even provide information on soil quality levels and other important factors affecting plant health.
Ready Access to Gardening Tools
One useful time-saving trick is to position your gardening tools so that they’re nearby. You don’t have to be working in the garden at the back of the property while your best tools are stored in the garage at the front of the house. Either put up a shed or create a special storage place for your tools (factor in the soil and debris tracked in if you’re going to do this). The time saving might seem minor, but it’ll add up the more often you want to be in the garden. Be sure to check out more gardening tips for extra ways to save time in the garden.
Low-Tech DIY Irrigation
If the high-tech lawn and plant watering aren’t for you, then consider using clever do-it-yourself ideas to create a self-watering irrigation system for your garden. There are many ways to do so without relying on smart sensors and a W-Fi connection for a data download. Low-tech can work just as well as going high-tech if that’s your personal preference.
Saving time in the garden helps avoid losing precious minutes and hours to unnecessary gardening chores. By cutting out the fluff, you can enjoy your time pottering about in your garden, tend to your plants and get the most out of it.
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