Spending a half an hour working in the garden can be magic. It will relax you, tone your muscles, help make you happy, provide vitamin D from the sunlight — and you may even create something wonderful, just in half an hour. (This doesn’t count the time spent in the garden centre. Garden centres can absorb an infinite amount of time, especially if you’re like me and love wandering among the roses or whatever else is in bloom.)
Create a vegetable garden in half an hour:
Choose your site — sunny if possible.
Scatter on 60cm of lucerne hay, bought from the garden centre. There’s no need to put down newspaper — the mulch will kill the grass.
Fill the centre with a layer of good potting or compost — also from the garden centre — at least 20cm thick. Leave a margin of about 20cm of hay around the potting mix. This will help stop grass and weeds encroaching from underneath.
Plant your vegie seedlings — again from the garden centre. Water well.
Scatter on slow release plant food. Water every few days. Pick and eat.
Create a new flowerbed:
Choose a spot where you’ll see the flowers every day, by the front door, or front gate, or where you can see them out the window. Now use the method above for creating a vegetable garden but to make your new flowerbed — plant flower seedlings instead. Useful tip: stick to one kind and colour of flower to begin with. It takes experience — or luck — to create a stunning montage of different sizes, shapes and colours.
Plant a herb garden:
In half an hour, the great herbs of the kitchen can be yours. Just create a garden, as above, or choose a patch of sunny lawn. Dig holes and plant the herbs, then mulch with newspaper and then at least 30cm of hay. Make sure you don’t suffocate the plants. Water the garden well for a few months until the plants are strongly growing and the grass under the mulch is dead. Mulch again once or twice a year.
Create an orchard on your balcony:
Buy six big pots, a bag of good potting mix, and six of your favourite fruit trees, the sort that do well in pots: any dwarf fruit trees, such as dwarf apples, peaches, nectarines, citrus, dwarf Stella cherry (self-pollinating), dwarf mulberry, dwarf pomegranate, “all-in-one” dwarf almond, Tahitian limes, cumquat, calamondin, blueberries, gooseberries, rhubarb, or the new jostaberries, a gooseberry currant cross.
Place a layer of potting mix in each pot. Take the fruit tree out of its bag; place in their new pots, filling any gaps with more potting mix.
Water well. Scatter on slow release plant food. Water twice a week. Pick and eat.
A wheelbarrow full of flowers or vegies:
Take any elderly wheelbarrow that has got holes in the bottom so it won’t fill up with water and flood your plants. Fill with potting mix, then plant flower seedlings — hardy, heat-loving ones such as petunias, calendulas, alyssum, ageratum or salvias with parsley round the edges if you like. Or just fill it with rhubarb, or drought-hardy veg, such as parsley, zucchini or tomatoes, with cucumbers to trail down over the side. An old wheelbarrow also makes an excellent herb garden.
Wheelbarrows are never invaded by couch grass and rarely get weeds. All you need to do is feed, water and admire — or even wheel your barrow into the middle of the lawn or by the front steps so you can admire it every day.
