How to Keep Up in the Garden-Zoning your Areas

TODAY’S VIDEO: Who wants a beautiful garden in 10-20 minutes a day?…I Do!! Today we will show you the routine I use to get my gardening done by zoning different sections of the gardens each day and spending 10-20 minutes in them. It will be the best time you can spend in the garden!

Please note: There may be tagged products in this video. Please know that I do earn a small commission from any affiliate links that you click on from this video, so thank you if you do purchase something this way. All proceeds are used to help continue to make fabulous videos for you!

ABOUT ME: Hello, my name is Michelle and I own a garden center and floral store called The Landscape Connection. I am a volunteer Master Gardener with the University of Illinois Extension. I am also a home gardener and a retired landscape designer and installer.
I have a passion for gardening and teaching so WELCOME! If you like our videos please subscribe, like, share, and leave your comments and questions. Join us and get your hands in the dirt!
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The Landscape Connection Gift & Garden Center
4472 S. Mulford Rd.
Rockford, Illinois 61109
815-633-5100

[Music] I am sure that there is not one person sitting out there right now that cannot relate to this. You’ve had a garden bed and it got totally full of weeds. It got totally unkempt and it was chaos at its best. Yeah, that’s happened to me and I am really good at keeping organized in my garden beds, but sometimes life happens. But for the most part, I keep control of my garden beds. And how do I do that? Well, I do that by spending 10 to 15 minutes a day in one section of my garden bed. So, for example, today is Monday. Now, you might be watching this on a Thursday, but I’m breaking this video down into like how I normally would go through my routine. And so, this garden bed right here, which is the driveway bed and the sidewalk bed, the two of these together, that’s my Monday bed. And I go through and I do specific things in a routine every week so that they don’t get away from me and they look good. Now, most of the time I spend 10 to 15 minutes in these beds. That’s really all they need. I have, for the most part, gotten my beds so that they’re pretty low maintenance and I don’t have to be staking things. I don’t have to be doing a lot of cutting back. Even though I will do one cut back. Yeah, I’m okay with that. I just don’t want to continually have to cut something over and over and over again or deadhead it to make it look good. So, these beds up here are the Monday beds. And we’re going to go through and we’re going to talk about what I do in these beds for 10 to 15 minutes. All right, that’s it. And you’ve got 10 or 15 minutes either in the morning before you go to work. You just might have to get up a little bit earlier or maybe right when you get home or maybe you can shoot over on your lunch break and get it done. You can find 10 or 15 minutes to do this. just don’t watch TV. Go do this instead. I mean, you can find the time. Now, the trick is you got to start right away in the spring. You have to make sure that you keep up on it every single week. Now, let’s say you miss a week, it will not be the end of the world. And your garden will not run away in one week. But if you continually go, “Oh, it’s okay if I miss it this week.” And you keep doing that. The next thing you know, you’re going to look at your bed and go, “Uhoh, I’m a little behind.” And then you’re going to have to spend some serious time in that bed getting it ready. I mean, that happened to me this year. My cottage garden ran away this year. Oh my gosh. I didn’t get out there. I didn’t get on my routine right away. I got other beds done and then I kept up on those. And then I just kept going, I’ll get to it. I’ll get to it. And by the time I got to it, oh my gosh, it I had weeds up to here. I lost plants. I had to redo some sections. That was heartbreaking because you spend all your love out there, you know, making it look the way you want. And then one time you just don’t get out there for a period of time and it’s chaos. So what am I doing in this routine? Well, first and foremost, I go through and I weed. If you weed when weeds are little, it is much easier than when weeds are up to here. When they’re up to here, they’re stubborn. They’re stuck. They might have set seed and dropped seed in your bed. And then you’ve perpetuated an even bigger weed issue. So get them when they’re little. I have two tools that I use when I’m weeding. One is a hula ho. Now, a hula ho is the best tool, I think, to get weeds when they’re little. And you can scrape them right out by scraping this along the ground. There’s a blade right here, and it’s open. And so, you just take this tool and you scrape it along the ground. And what it does is right here, it pulls those little bitty baby weeds out because there’s no established roots. Now, this doesn’t work great on things that are already in the ground. If it’s a little bit bigger, it might like get the surface of the weed out, but the roots still down in there. So, this is the best tool to use weekly just around your bed very quickly super fast. I love it. Now, every once in a while, I’ll miss a weed. I mean, I I I admit it. I miss weeds, okay? And sometimes weeds disguise themselves in the plants and I’m not really paying that close of attention to the weed because it’s disguised in a plant and then the next thing you know it’s like 3 feet high. Well, that’s when I get my hory knife out and I kill it with this hory knife because this digs into the ground so nicely and it’s got this beautiful serrated edge on it and I love this thing. I feel like the weed hunter with this. Anyways, those are my two tools that I will go around and get the weeds out of the bed. And literally, it takes me maybe maybe to do both of these beds. We can time it 3 minutes. I mean, I bet you it won’t even take me that long. Now, if I skip a week and I’ve gone a little bit longer, it might take me a little bit longer to do it, but weeding is definitely one of the things that I will do in my beds. Now, I probably don’t have as many weeds as some of you guys because I use pre-emergent. Now, for me, pre-emergent is a product that I choose to use. Some of you may not like to use it, and that’s okay, but I like to use it. Pre-emergent, and I use a product called Snapshot, is a chemical that stops new weed seed from germinating. So, if you already have weeds and they have roots, this isn’t for that. This is for when you have seed that gets light and then it starts to grow because you know weeds, they don’t even need water. Most of them just need light and they’ll start growing. Now, even though I put pre-emergent down in my bed in April, it only lasts about 75 days. So, guess what? It’s the middle of July and today we will be doing that as one of our chores in the beds is putting down our second application of pre-emergent. Now, pre-emergent is going to stop weed, seed, and other seed from germinating. So, if you’re seeding zenyas or other pretty things in your beds that you’re going to grow from seed, you can’t use pre-emergent in the areas where you’re growing those because they won’t germinate. Another place that you’re not going to use pre-emergent is if you put bulbs in the ground because that will also the growth of your bulb. So, I’m going to be sprinkling this around. It’s going to rain tomorrow. It’s water activated and that will be my second application for the season. That might take me maybe a minute. Okay, so we’re up to four minutes now. All right, what else am I doing in my bed in my 10 minutes? Well, I am going to clean up any foliage on anything that is damaged. I’m going to look for broken branches. I’m going to look for leaves that maybe don’t look good. If I have hostas in the bed, I cut the flowers off because I don’t really love them. So, I’m going to be cleaning up anything that needs to be cleaned up or maybe I have a flower that needs to be cut back like a salvia or Veronica or something. Now, all of those I’ve pretty much well I haven’t cut my Veronica back but I have cut back all my salvia but there might come a point where like when I’m in this bed I have dlies and that’s not for this week but maybe in three weeks I’ll be cutting back the foliage on the dlies so it’ll flush up new foliage to take me through the the rest of the season. So, not everything needs to be pruned every single week. It’s just what I see. And that might take me another three minutes to do that. Okay. So, what am I at? I’m at 7 minutes. I got 3 minutes left. What are we going to do in the last 3 minutes? My last three minutes is going to be spent fertilizing my annuals. Now, I used to do it once a week and do everything at the same time. And I found that that was becoming a little bit overwhelming and I was skipping weeks because I didn’t have time to get all the way around to everything and it takes me like an hour to do everything. So what I started doing was what needed to be fertilized in the beds that I was working in with a water-soluble fertilizer. And this is just for annuals. That’s when I did it. So I also fertilized. Now, I’m using a watering can to do this, so it takes me a little bit longer, and I’m okay with that because I like to look at my plants and be in my garden. And so, there you go. There’s my 10 minutes. I’ve given you grace and given you an extra five minutes to maybe you don’t work at the same pace I do. Maybe you like to meander through your garden. Sometimes I’m just like, “Woo, get it done.” And so, I just speed through my garden and get it done. And then that way that chore is checked off and I can move on to something else. But some of you, this might be your time in your garden and you might want to take your time doing it. So, I’ve given you an extra five minutes. But you know what? You can take as long as you want to do it. You just need to do it. [Music] Step one is done. That’s the weeding. And that only took me 2 minutes and 10 seconds. Oo, I have an extra minute. What to do with it? Well, I’ll probably spend it doing a little bit of grooming because I am going to be getting some of the tattered leaves off the hostas as well as cutting out the flowers. So, part two is going to be grooming. And I’m just gonna go through and I’m gonna groom what I think needs to be groomed. I’m gonna give myself three minutes to do this. And if I take four or five, it’ll be okay. All right. But I’m just going to go through with my popup bag. I am going to use my felos. Let me get them right here. All right. And I’m going to go through and I’m just going to anything I think that needs to be groomed through here. And I’m looking for like icky looking foliage, dead branches, bent branches, anything that maybe needs a haircut. so it’ll relum again or have better foliage for the rest of the season. And then I’m going to carry that through into the driveway bed down here. So, all right, let’s do it. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] [Music] [Music] Hey. Hey. Hey. [Music] [Music] Hey, hey, hey. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] [Music] [Music] That was definitely 10 minutes well spent. Now, next week it won’t take me as long. I won’t have to put pre-emergent down. I won’t have to clean up pasta leaves. And the dlillies won’t be finished yet. So, I won’t have to cut those back. So next week, yeah, it’ll be weeding, feeding, and that’s about it. So some weeks it’s really fast. Today was about 10 minutes. Next week might be five. The week after that might be 20 because I have to cut all the dillies back. So it really just depends on what you’re doing in the bed. But I can’t think of any bed that I spend more than 20 minutes in, unless I’m doing like major planting or I’m digging holes or doing something like that that is not part of the regular routine, but I throw it in just to get it done. That’s all I’ve got. Make sure you send your pictures in for Garden Gab at the end of the month if you haven’t already done so. They are coming in and there are some really nice pictures that are coming in. So, what is Garden Gab? Well, Garden Gab happens twice a month. The first Garden Gab is where I answer questions about the videos that we’ve had or general questions that I see a lot of. The second garden gab is where we talk in the garden, but I am sharing viewer submission pictures that you send in of all of your love and hard work in your own garden. So, if you want to get in on that, take a picture of something in your garden. One picture. Tell me who you are, where you live, what we’re looking at, and what zone it is. Turn your camera so that it’s a landscape format like this. Then, you’re going to send it to this email address right here. And if I don’t have this up long enough for you to snap a picture of it, it’s always down in the description. So, that’s all I’ve got for today, you guys. I hope you get your hands in the dirt. Happy gardening. We’ll see you next time. Bye, everyone. [Music]