Garden-Sickness

Many Canadians, myself included, will have four days of work this week thanks to the holiday on Monday observed as Family Day here in Ontario and by a host of other names across the country.

The thing about gardening, though, is that it doesn’t take holidays. There are lots of you who will be taking week-long (or even longer) vacations away from your gardens this summer. Your plants will still grow. The sun will still dry out the soil, and the rain will still fall (or not fall) as planned by Mother Nature herself. She’s never on vacation.

So, we’re at a crossroads here. We want to take our holidays (as we should) but we want to have nice gardens, too. If you’re like me, your vacations include visits to as many gardens tours, botanical gardens, and greenhouses as I have time for. You don’t want to have to spend your horticultural holiday wondering how your plants are doing back at home.

You have a number of options. Over the next few weeks, I am going to give you several ways you can avoid the garden-sickness that happens to so many of us gardeners when we venture outside of our own. I have come up with this term: similar to home-sickness targeted specifically towards those with the greener of thumbs.

Preparing the holiday garden doesn’t have to be difficult. It does, however, require some planning and now’s the time to start.

I am going to give you a task: make a drawing of your current garden or the empty space you have to put one. Use a pencil and just do a rough sketch – you definitely don’t have to be an artist. Just something you can understand, with any immovable objects defined (trees, buildings, septic tank location, etc.).

I will make up one of my garden this week as well. We will go through this process together.

Happy drawing! We will see you next week for your next step toward garden-sickness prevention.