On Dealing With Overwhelm in the Garden

“The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret to getting started is breaking your overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.”
—Mark Twain

This is the first summer with both kids fully nap-free, and I greatly underestimated what that would do to my garden time. For years, naptime was my sacred window — an hour or two of guaranteed quiet where I could actually get things done outside. That window is long gone now, and it’s taken me most of June to admit that the garden I built during the napping years doesn’t fit the life I’m living anymore.

Three years ago, in 2023, I expanded the garden 3x. At the time I had two kids who both still napped, seemingly endless hours, and big dreams. It was glorious, but it was also, in hindsight, a garden built for a version of my life that was always going to be temporary.

In so many ways this feels like my best gardening year ever — I nailed seed starting, hardening off, planting, timing, composting, amending the soil. But every time I go outside for 30 minutes, I start panicking about how much there is to do, and my brain decides that if I can’t get it all perfectly weeded and composted right this second, there’s no point trying at all. That’s crazy talk, I know. So today I turned to my husband and asked for help — because lately the garden has tipped from happy place to something that falls on the back burner and gets neglected at the expense of everything else.

I’ve written before about good enough gardening and my gardening prioritization system for triaging tasks. Both were about changing how I work within the garden. What I’ve had to finally come to terms with this year is that the garden itself is the problem, like the actual size. Bigger isn’t always better! It clicked into place recently while volunteering with the Master Gardeners: a garden my size typically has a rotating crew of 5-6 people. No wonder I’ve been burnt out trying to run it solo.

So here’s what I’m changing for next year — written down mostly so Future Amy has no excuse to forget:

1. Perennials around the inside perimeter, mulched and left alone.
Rhubarb, chives, asparagus, comfrey — the same fruit tree guild logic I already use elsewhere, just extended to the fence line. My keyhole beds make that area annoying to weed, it’s too big to fully plant every year, and bare soil in a huge bed is a weed invitation with a bow on it. Perennials solve this once and then mostly take care of themselves.

2. The right side becomes the sprawl zone.
Pumpkins and squash get their own dedicated real estate instead of me tucking them in around everything else like a vegetable game of Tetris. I already preach “if it fits, it sits” companion planting — turns out sprawling vines don’t really fit anywhere except their own territory.

3. Fewer beds, more sitting space.
This one is counterintuitive, because I have always operated under the principle of, “If some garden is good, more is better!” The garden is tucked behind the garage, so if life is busy I can go days without setting foot back there. A place to actually sit might mean I spend more low-pressure time out there simply existing in the space, not just working it. Sometimes the fix for “I don’t have time to garden” isn’t more efficient gardening. It’s making the garden a place you want to be even when you’re not accomplishing anything.

I love this hobby, and most days it’s still pure calm. But lately it’s been tipping toward stress more often than not, and I don’t think that’s a me problem so much as a “this garden has outgrown what one person with two small kids can reasonably maintain” problem. Good enough gardening was never just about lowering my standards for individual tasks, and this year it also means lowering my standards for how much garden I need in the first place.

So this season I’ll be making extensive notes on exactly what’s working, what mistakes I have to avoid like the plague next year, and chipping away at the weeds while trying to not get overwhelmed. It’s just a silly garden!

Until next weekend, cutting it short so I can go for a swim,

Amy

An Outsize Affection for the Biggest of Leaves [New York Times] — Margaret Roach (one of my favorites!) walks through favorites like the umbrella plant, ostrich ferns, native pokeweed, and a big-leaf magnolia.

War‑induced fertilizer shortage may be reducing US soil and water pollution [The Conversation] — Decades of farmers over-applying nitrogen and phosphorus have built up large legacy nutrient reserves in soil (especially in the Midwest and livestock-heavy regions), meaning many farms can cut fertilizer use substantially with little yield loss — while also reducing runoff that drives algae blooms and dead zones.

North Carolina Wants You to Stop Saying “Sweet Potato” [Offrange] — Explores how this tiny town became the center of America's sweetpotato industry (North Carolina grows nearly two-thirds of the US supply), and the local campaign to spell it "sweetpotato" as one word since it's botanically unrelated to a potato.

If I Had to Learn How to Cook Again, I’d Start Here [Hot Dish With Sohla by Sohla El-Waylly] Sohla breaks down the cooking skills she'd build first if starting from scratch, framed around the idea that real cooking confidence is "earned intuition" built from understanding why techniques work, not from collecting recipes. I have and love her cookbook Start Here!

Five hosting habits I nicked from my friends [Convivial by Olly Rowe] — Next houseguest we have I’ll offer a bath to in our oversized clawfoot tub!

That’s it for free subscribers this week! Spilling the beans below on a secret project we’ve been working on at the house since last fall —and some big landscaping decisions that I’ll be making moving forward.