You want to garden but you don’t have time. Don’t sweat it. Focus just enough to cultivate one small patch, and you might be surprised how committed you become to helping your garden thrive.

May Garden Preparations

If you already followed March planning steps and April preparation of the ground, you can probably get your gardening done before breakfast on a Saturday.

• Gather materials
• Mix soil
• Plant
• Water

Gather materials. Our gathering began as we investigated mystery bags in our garage and found potting soil, we turned over the year’s compost, and we talked to neighbors to borrow a very tiny amount of paint for the trim on our raised bed planter. We didn’t end up having enough compost, dirt, and other material, so gathering involved going to the gardening store. Sad though it seems to buy dirt, we didn’t have other sources nearby. Our county sells top soil, but they didn’t have any available when we went to buy it. If you are fortunate enough to live near a farm, you might find all of the manure you need for free. We had neither easily available, and our goal is not to fret about the garden this year. So, the store.
Goal: use what you have on hand or can borrow then buy as a last resort

Mix soil. The soil mix you need depends on what you are going to grow. We added a lot of manure, peat moss, compost, and top soil.
Goal: give your garden the best possible start

Plant. If you started seeds last month, it might be time to plant out. We had snow just last week, and we may have snow again until the end of May, so we only plant hardy plants outdoors in early May. Whether you plant out or keep your seedlings in the house or garage a bit longer depends on your zone and your plants. If you look closely at our main photo or skip to the close up below, you will see our hops. They were in pots that we moved indoors during the coldest nights over the past month. Since the planter is sheltered, we think they won’t get more snow. So, we planted them today.
Goal: plant out when the zone and plant align

Water. If you plant out, press down the nice, loamy soil, and water.
Goal: wet well the first day then ignore for a couple of days—if you can

Top Soil Mix

Our chosen spot has grown nothing but the same overgrown bush for 20+ years. The dirt is not impressively rich. Building our raised bed up 16″ over an area 3′ x 6′ meant that we would need a total of 24 cubic feet of soil, so we knew we would need to add to our few inches of dry dirt.

There was so much space to fill in my new raised bed that I decided to try lasagna gardening, with alternating layers of material. After digging out my dry, sad dirt and many, many rocks, then setting aside the dirt in buckets, I put down a layer of pizza boxes for my first lasagna layer. I followed this with dry grass and other dry pieces that I hadn’t cleared out from the garden last fall. Dry was followed by green grass clippings, then dried leaves, and peat moss. This brought us up to only 6″ deep, leaving me with another 16 cubic feet to go.

We didn’t have any more dirt or compost left, so we headed to the store to buy bags of top soil, peat moss, and manure. The manure should be about 40% of the total volume, according to our helpful in-store expert. By the time I added bags of stray potting soil I found in my garage, I think we had about 30% manure. Total cost for all of the bags for 16 cubic feet was $34.

My Lasagna Layers:

Top Soil Mix
Peat Moss
Leaves
Green Grass
Dry Grass and garden litter
Cardboard

Total Cost So Far

• Wood for raised bed – recovered from siding
• Paint to match our house – borrowed from neighbor (since we all use the same paint)
• Compost – homemade
• Soil – $34 for manure, top soil, peat moss

Add this to previous $18 for 3 hops plants for a total of $52 so far.

Total Time So Far

We have not been spending just 30 minutes a month. I think we would have been a lot closer if we had chosen a smaller spot and not built a planter. The planter took most of a Saturday afternoon. My husband and son did a beautiful job building and painting our raised bed to blend in with our house and small yard. Apart from the building, we are spending about 30 minutes every two weeks.

Research and planning – 15 minutes
Ripping out old bushes – 15 minutes
Mapping out the area – 15 minutes
Sorting out materials – 30 minutes
Planting hops in pots – 20 minutes
Building raised bed – 5 hours
Painting raised bed – 30 minutes
Digging bed – 15 minutes
Lasagna layers – 10 minutes
Shopping – 1 hour
Mixing top soil – 15 minutes
Planting – 10 minutes

Total so far = 9 hours

Bonus, several of our neighbors have come by to see our raised bed. The siding matches our houses, and they asked how to make a planter like this for themselves. Maybe they were being polite, but we had nice conversations about our gardens, our dogs sniffed one another, and we had an all-around good time.

Your May List: Planting

How much time you spend this month depends on how well you prepared the ground last month. If you already dug in compost to create soil that is ready for the plants you started last month, you will have plenty of time to gaze at your garden in your allotted 30 minutes. Here is one possible way to spend 30 minutes on your garden in May.

• Gather materials (10 minutes)
• Mix soil (10 minutes)
• Add plant (5 minutes)
• Water (5 minutes)

If you didn’t plan or prepare yet, you still have time. Set aside a Saturday, and you’ll be ready to cultivate your tiny patch through the season. Easy.

The Hops

In the time total, I didn’t count all of the time my husband spent fussing over his hops in their pots over the past month—poking the soil, watering, taking the plants in the house or garage at night, and so on. He has been babying his plants, and they are now 1-3″.

He bought Centennial (pictured), Cascade, and Nugget. The Nugget is the most bitter, so he carefully placed it in the center of the less bitter two in hopes that he will be able to tell them apart when it comes time to pick the hops and brew the beer.

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This is the year we are letting go of our ambitions for a perfect garden and creating a garden that fits into our busy schedule. We are planting wild gardens for busy parents.

April Preparations

If you follow last month’s easy steps, you already started small, shared your plan, and set your goal. This month, we prepare the ground and the seed or plant. If you are just starting now, it’s easy to catch up.

• Prepare the ground
• Prepare the seed or plant

Prepare the ground. Dig the dirt in the area where you are going to plant. How deep you dig depends on the plants. About 6″ average will be fine for most plants. For carrots or potatoes, dig at least 12″. For my volunteer pumpkins, I don’t dig at all. They just grow in the hard dirt next to my sidewalk where my kids carve pumpkins each year. How you prepare the ground depends on what you want the dirt to do.
Goal: dig a little

Add organic matter to the dirt. If you made compost over the past year, its time has come. Dig in about 50/50 dirt and organic matter. If you don’t have enough compost, you can add shredded leaves. If you still don’t have enough, go to a garden store, tell them the condition of your soil, and buy a bag of whatever they recommend. If you have clay, you might need sand (though be careful adding sand). If you have sand, you might need peat moss or topsoil. You’ll pay, sure, but it’s a trade off between money and the time it takes to make enough compost.
Goal: add organic matter

Prepare the seed or plant. When you plant outside depends on your weather and your plant. Look at your projected last frost date. You will probably not plant until after that date, but you can make exceptions if you are willing to put in a little more time to do research. Add the frost date to your plan, if you’ve been taking notes. (Gardeners take notes. If you are more wild than that, fine.) That is your target planting date. If you have to order a plant, place your order now. If you need to grow seedlings, check the seeds to see how quickly they grow. Plan your seed start date so you have a seedling ready on your plant date. It could be time to start the seeds now.
Goal: have the seed or plant ready on the planting date

To check your projected last frost date, you can look at these frost charts for Canada, which give you only one date as a broad estimate, or enter your zip code for this very cool frost chart that gives you the chance of frost by date and spring temperature.

If you have chosen your one tiny patch to nurture for this year, preparing the ground should not take you more than 30 minutes.

What I did.

We prepared the ground the difficult way. Preparing the ground is not such an easy task with my ground.

Shallow. My soil is generally shallow, since my house is built on what used to be a stone quarry. I remember one year when my mother planted carrots that all came out bent at 90 degree angles. (I live in the house I grew up in.) After about 8″, we just have rocks.

Dry. I live in a desert. The soil dries out very quickly and easily, so I don’t want to make it even easier for water to drain.

Depleted. For at least the past 20 years, the spot I chose has had the same old bushes, with no improvements at all in the soil. You can see the stumps that we finally pulled out in last month’s post.

Visible. Because my space is along the sidewalk leading to my front door, I also want it to look nice.

Because of all of this and the fact that my husband is very attached to the success of his hops, I planned a raised bed. A raised bed gives us a lot more flexibility in soil quality and depth.

Ground conclusion: preparing the ground did not take 30 minutes.

I presented my husband with the idea of a raised bed. I showed him instructions and pointed out the pile of painted wood in our backyard, left over from replacing the cedar siding on our house. In my mind, I can see how I would do it in 30 minutes, but his fussery has resulted in approximately 1 hour of planning, 2 hours of him deciding where to put the bed (in a space that is only 2-4″ larger than the bed on each side), and I assume another 2-12 hours of him putting the pieces together and filling them with dirt. As you can see from the photo, he isn’t done. I hear the hammering as I write, so I am confident you will see the result next month.

The expected result is a 6′ x 3′ x 1.5′ cedar-sided raised bed that matches the color of our house, with hops that shade the wall of our kitchen, making that room ever so slightly cooler in the hottest part of summer.

Because the hops we are planting are my husband’s babies, intended to be used for home brewing, he is fussing over them and their bed. That’s fine, of course, as long as he has the time to fuss. In last month’s post I suggested that one of the essentials of your wild garden is to share the gardening or the planning. I shared the idea, and my husband took over. I love this. I just need to give him gentle nudges every once in a while, like researching raised beds and pointing to already painted wood in the yard.

You could also have your children do supervised planting, though that probably takes longer than just doing it yourself. It depends whether your goal is the process or the product.

We prepared for the plant. Three hops rhizomes arrived this week. We need to plant them as quickly as possible, but we also need to avoid frost. We had 8″ of snow last week before the two 80 degree days showed up and melted it away, so it’s warm but we aren’t past the threat of frost quite yet. According to the zip code frost chart above, we still have a 90% chance of more frost. So, part of our gardening this week involves planning to protect the plants on cold nights.

Hops can sometimes grow 12″ a day, though 24″ a week is more usual. We have a space 8-9′ then we will train them to grow out. To give them support as they grow, we are running a wire up from the bed to the wire where our grapes and blackberries grow along the edge of our roof.

If your plant will need support, plan for that as you prepare the space.

Your April List: Prepare the Ground

You can do it! Spend 30 minutes on your garden in April.

• Dig the ground (10 minutes)
• Add organic matter (10 minutes)
• Start the plants (10 minutes)

If you have less than ideal soil to start, you might want to spend extra time preparing the ground, though you don’t have to go so far as to build a raised bed like I did. This is definitely the month to spend a little extra time if you want your garden to perform well.

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