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    The Five Minute Garden
    The Five Minute Garden
    The Five Minute Garden
    Ebook211 pages1 hour

    The Five Minute Garden

    By Laetitia Maklouf and National Trust Books

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    About this ebook

    This book breaks the work you need to do to keep your garden in perfect shape into daily five minute chunks. Following this little and often approach, you’ll be amazed how much you can achieve.

    Laetitia Maklouf is a garden writer and busy mother of three who has realised that the secret of gardening without becoming overwhelmed is to do something small every day. She’s packed this book with little bursts of activity – spruce, chop, nurture, fuss or tackle a larger project – that can all be managed in five-minute forays.

    Spruce the lawn by raking fallen leaves in October, or fuss with your snail defences in May. Nurture your hardy annual seedlings in December, and chop your hydrangeas in March.

    Every day, rain or shine, do something for your garden with whatever time you can spare. Before you know it, you will have a daily gardening habit and a beautiful garden you can enjoy all year round.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins UK
    Release dateApr 1, 2020
    ISBN9781911657194
    The Five Minute Garden
    Author

    Laetitia Maklouf

    Laetitia Maklouf is a writer and blogger. She is a columnist for 'The Sunday Times' and has written two gardening books. She runs 'The Five Minute Gardener' blog and newsletter – a chatty and fun diary of the tasks busy people can squeeze into 5 minutes to keep their garden in top shape year round.

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      Book preview

      The Five Minute Garden - Laetitia Maklouf

      Introduction

      Let me tell you a story. It’s about a garden. The garden was large for its city location, and its owner had made sure that every inch of it was full to bursting with flowers. There was neither rhyme nor reason to the placement of each plant. Nature weaved its merry tapestry in the borders and the place buzzed with life. It was beautiful and magical and overgrown; a law unto itself, and people loved it, soaking up its summer bounty. But its owner spent her time swinging wildly between love and loathing for her garden. She loved the wildness and the colour, but it also made her feel panicked and overwhelmed. The grass grew out of control and her children opted for the park instead of the garden; there was nowhere to sit and relax, or eat, or walk about. The garden had got away from her and the balance between human and nature, represented by a garden, had got wildly out of whack.

      This was me a few years ago, looking forlornly out of the window, with three small children to look after and wondering if I would ever have time to stay on top of the garden, along with everything else that needed my attention. It seemed impossible; I was accustomed to gardening at weekends or setting aside entire days to ‘deal with the garden’, spending hours at a time getting things back under control, only to find myself in the same situation a couple of weeks later. I stopped gardening altogether for a while, and then I made the commitment to redesign the garden with the intention of minimising my workload. The flowerbeds were dramatically reduced, and I kept to a painfully tiny palette of plants to fill them. I got rid of any and all containers smaller than 40cm (16in) wide and put in a path around the edge of the garden so that I’d have easy access to the flowerbeds from both sides. And guess what? The same thing happened. That first summer, as I was enjoying the new space, that old feeling of being overwhelmed returned, just as strongly as it had before, except that this time, because my garden was no longer ‘wild’ there was nowhere to hide, and when I ran out of time to tend to it, it actually looked worse than before; bare and unkempt s opposed to abundant and messy.

      I realised changing my garden wasn’t enough; I needed to change the way I interacted with it too. So, I decided that instead of trying to carve out large tracts of time in my busy life once in a while, instead I would go out and do something small every day. I looked carefully at my schedule and realised that in all honesty, I had no more than five minutes every day to give to the garden. I started to go out every day, rain or shine, whether I felt like it or not, and do something for my garden for five minutes. I would pick random things – the quickest, easiest things first, and then I began to tackle larger endeavours, five minutes at a time, over a period of days. Sometimes I would spend more than five minutes, caught up in the moment, and find I had actually done an hour. Often I would do less than five minutes; three minutes of weeding squeezed in right at the end of a day, or two minutes of deadheading snatched while the children weren’t pawing at me. After a couple of months of this, I looked outside and realised this approach was working far better than I could ever have imagined. The garden was cared-for and inviting, and the lawn was mown, and my children were playing on it. But more importantly, I was enjoying my own space too – actually sitting down in my own garden. Finally, it was doing the job for which it was intended; to be a happy space for me and my family to enjoy.

      The purpose of this book is to take the decision-making out of the process and act as a springboard to catapult you out into your outside space; it’s packed with five-minute things you might want to try over the gardening year, which you can pick and choose at random when you have five minutes to spare. These little bursts of activity are set under different headings: Spruce, Chop, Nurture, Fuss and Project. I tend do one thing from each heading over the course of the week. You can find the formula I follow at the back of this book (see here), but everyone is different, and the important thing is just to begin – just pick one thing at random from the relevant month in this book, and go out and start on that, because at some point in the very near future, you’ll look behind you and realise how very far you have come.

      Happy gardening.

      A note about the five-minute thing

      If you decide to use the five-minute approach to gardening, you should know that the timing aspect can be pretty elastic. There are days when you’ll have the time (and inclination) to stay and keep going for much longer than five minutes, and there will be other days, when you can literally only manage 300 seconds. The point is that we can ALL stop what we’re doing and go outside for five minutes. That’s the idea that gets us out there and doing something positive. Yes, you can take this whole thing totally literally if you like – set a timer and do proper five-minute bursts – and your garden will look lovely, and you will benefit too, because you made the time to go outside. But you can also let the mood take you for longer, and you’ll be able to go a bit deeper, and understand your garden a bit better … it’s not set in stone; it’s up to you.

      Important things

      In order to use your five minutes effectively, you need to work towards:

      Having tools, outdoor shoes and gloves easily accessible.

      Having water easily accessible, in cans or a hose, ready to use (see here).

      Having only large containers (wider than 40cm/16in in diameter).

      January

      ‘The shortest day has passed, and whatever nastiness of weather we may look forward to in January and February, at least we notice that the days are getting longer.’

      Vita Sackville-West

      Let’s begin by saying that too much messing about with the garden at this time of year can actually do more harm than good; trampling all over your borders, for example, will cause compaction, while a flurry of seed-sowing will, in the long run, just leave you deeply anxious and depressed. So, with that in mind, here are some gentle five-minute endeavours for those itching for action and needing to get out and sniff the air.

      SPRUCE

      Start at the back door

      If you really can’t bear the idea of stepping outside (and I wouldn’t blame you in a wet, cold miserable January), just use this trick to get you going. Start at the back door. Put your gloves, coat and boots on, look outside and go directly to the first thing your eyes fall upon that’s looking a bit like it needs some attention: it could be a gone-over perennial you haven’t dealt with; or it could be something you’ve left in the garden that shouldn’t be there. Whatever it is, go directly towards it and deal with it. Once that’s done, you’ll probably want to do some more … but if not, then just go inside. It’s all good.

      Sweep away

      Yes, you’re still sweeping – not leaves, but possibly snow and definitely the general detritus that seems to build up at this time of year, firstly because it is generally wet or damp, and things stick when it’s wet or damp, and secondly because when there is less to look at in the garden, one’s eye gets caught by the rather more mundane stuff. So, sweep away Cinderella, and regard this as your five minutes of wholesomeness before you retreat back indoors to eat the rest of the Stilton.

      Weed every day you can

      Honestly, honestly, if you can do a bit of judicious sprucing up in the borders or pots every day, then unwanted weeds will never become a problem for you … they just won’t. Unless it’s snowing or pitifully cold, then a bit of weeding, with a podcast and a kneeler will do all the good things for your mind, body and soul. Put a timer on, and some headphones, and just go for it.

      Gritting

      It really is a good idea to get your grit on at this time of year, firstly because it is bound to become icy or snowy when you least expect it, and secondly because it is an awful bore to spend the new year with a broken leg. Go out and get some bags of grit and put them, together with a pair of gloves and a shovel or trowel, wherever you think they’ll be most needed when the time comes.

      Pond care

      Check your pond (or body of water). If you have fish then it’s a good idea to float a football on the surface to stop it icing over. And if you haven’t done so already, take five minutes to clear a few leaves out. This five-minute leaf removal system is a good thing to keep going with (like brushing your teeth every morning) whenever you pass your pond or happen to be lurking near it. A pool clear of soggy, mouldering leaves will lift even the most neglected of gardens due to light refraction; it’s one of those endeavours that pays great dividends.

      CHOP

      Brown crispy or soggy bits

      You may have ignored all this at the end of last year. You may have been

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