The Surprising Gardening Time Distribution

Hey, this is Marjorie, and in case you’re wondering why I’m wearing this baseball cap, it’s because I really need a haircut. It keeps falling in my eyes and just tiling down around and out of your head. Anyway, in this video I want to talk to you a little bit about setting your expectations for time. This is going to be in relation to gardening specifically. So when you’re setting up your garden at the beginning of the season, you should probably expect about 40% of your time is going to be in setting everything up.

So this is going to be adding compost, transplanting in plants, or even getting your starter plants going, or adding in some nutrients, getting the garden bed ready, maybe doing some weeding or whatever you need to do. In some cases, it might be building the garden bed. And then about 20% of your time is going to be, and especially if you use, I’m hoping you’re using the raised bed system that I’ve been recommending to, you know, the one that’s two center blocks high, and like, you know, 12, 13 feet long and four or five feet wide.

It’s great you can sit on the edge. I think you’ve seen that over at the, yes, the free webinar, the free webinar at backyardfoodproduction.com where I’ll teach you how to grow half of your own food in your backyard. Even if you have no experience, you’re older and you’re out of shape. Oh, God, I sometimes I hate myself for that. Anyway, in the garden, about 40% of the time at the beginning of the season or the, yeah, the beginning of every growth season, and hopefully you got more than one, you’re going to be doing stuff like that, maintaining the bed, pulling out weeds, adding compost, you know, getting stuff ready, doing the transplanting in, maybe getting irrigation set up, whatever you need to do to get this thing set up, and it takes a bit of time.

You know, usually that’s done like here and there over a couple of weekends, something like that. Then 20% of the time is during the growth season, you’re doing some weeding, watering, watering should be really should only take you like two or three minutes to water that bed every day with a nice spray hoser, and it’s a great time to look at what’s going on. If you’ve gotten on an automatic system, that’s great, but, you know, I really recommend doing it by hand when you’re there, but, you know, it takes a little bit of time and there’s going to be a little bit of weeding to do.

Part of the reason I recommend that system in the raised beds is eventually the plants grow and crowd out any possible weeds, so it really cuts down on weeding. You can be watching for insect damage and handling that if you need to, and this is the shocker to most people, is that it’s about 40% of the time is in harvesting and processing. You know, really, I don’t know how many times somebody says, I started this old garden that’s growing really well, and, you know, if you want to go in there and harvest all the tomatoes, take as much as you want, I just don’t have any.

I’m like, what? You grew all of this? I mean, really, I’ve scored in a bunch of gardens before people just, you know, didn’t want to do the work of harvesting. Hey, cat, what’s up? Okay, so I want to show you what I got here. These are gondules. These are beans, and here in Puerto Rico, we have a tree called the gondule tree, which is basically like a green bean tree, and you can either pick them when they’re fresh and eat them like green beans, or what I’ve done is I wait until they dried and I harvest them now.

And so, you know, there’s this job of cracking them open and getting the beans out. Now, some people do this, so you’re driving over them on a, in a driveway or something, you got a huge amount of them. I really honestly just prefer cracking open the, uh, cracking it open, letting the things drop out. Well, normally I take the shells and put them in a container somewhere so I can save myself that work. And I’m like, oh, that’s so tedious and all that. And you know what, though, this used to be work that family would do together on a porch and they’d all be shelling the beans and somebody would be telling, I did the wrong, I put the seed in the wrong, the beans in the wrong one.

You know, somebody will be telling stories, uh, you know, catching up with each other. You’re sitting there on the porch talking and you’re, and you’re doing something useful. You’re, you’re shelling the beans and a little modern day version of that is I often, when I’m doing it is I’ll have, um, you know, a good friend on the phone just talking to him, you know, a really nice juice, juicy phone conversation. Um, like with my brother used to do with my daughter, Kimber, we used to both have like a house cleaning time where we would both, we’d have these long, juicy two, three hour conversations while we’re both cleaning up the house and tidying it up.

And it’s not quite the same as being together, but it’s pretty damn close. By the way, we’re not talking right now. And apparently that’s a mother-daughter thing, which I’m discovering. And I’m vaguely remembering when I was a daughter, we did that. And now that I’m a mother, I’m like, damn, I hate it. But, uh, you know, this is what we’re doing. Anyway, so yeah, so a really good phone call with a friend. And, um, while you’re processing I’ve also found that canning and that kind of thing, just so much more fun to do with a group of people, uh, two, three, other, four, other, uh, you know, friends or family members or whatever, just doing this kind of handwork together.

So that, that’s a summary of the, of the breakdown, right? You’re going to be doing a chunk of time in the beginning throughout most of the growing season. There’s really not that much to do. And then at the end, uh, the harvest and processing is, is, uh, you know, just set your mind mentally that that’s, that’s the thing. The harvesting and the processing, by the way, is the time to bring in kids. They love it. They love doing that. They may not like the processing as much, but they definitely love the harvesting.

And, uh, yeah, that’s a, you know, uh, some of my favorite memories. Potatoes. When you’re digging potatoes, the processing on that’s not that hard. You just kind of rinse them off and we would have a competition, you know, who had found the biggest one and who found the littlest one and who’s got the ugliest one and who’s got the one that looks the most like uncle Frank, you know, that kind of fun. So, you know, definitely get the family involved, but that’s, you know, just want to set your expectations. So you realize what you know what you’re getting into.

And so 40, 20, 40, and that’s it. And, uh, you know, growing your own food, you’re going to find it to be one of the most rewarding things that you ever do. And if you want to see that webinar, I’ll put it again. Why not? Backyardfoodproduction.com. Okay. I’ll see you in another video. [tr:trw].