Strange as the term ‘over-gardening’ sounds, a surprising number of gardeners — both new and old ones — are guilty of doing one, or all, of the following:

Over-digging.

Over-planting.

Over-feeding.

Over-watering.

Over-weeding.

Over-producing.

Over-maintaining.

In an attempt at making gardening worth the effort you put in and to minimise rather than maximise necessary hours of labour, let’s take a look at the ‘over’ departments one by one.

A handy guide on avoiding over-the-top solutions for common gardening woes

Over-digging:

Digging is strenuous work which, once the initial ‘create a garden’ stage is over, can be more destructive than productive. Providing that initial soil preparation was good, there is no need to keep on digging the same patch of ground over and over again. This over-digging completely destroys healthy soil structure along with all the beneficial creatures and invisible micro-organisms inhabiting it. These, when left well alone, actively work 24/7 on 365 days a year to keep the soil in tip-top condition without any human ‘help’. Your contribution to soil health should be limited to disturbing as little as possible when seed sowing / planting. Later it should be maintained by top feeding through repeated applications of organic compost / old, well-rotted, organic manure and by mulching. Just because the neighbour or the guy on the gardening programme dig their gardens to extinction doesn’t mean that you have to follow suit.

Over-planting: Think, long, hard and seriously before sowing / planting anything at all. People tend, for instance, to sow all the seeds from a packet which, if germination is good, can mean that there isn’t enough room for all of them to grow. This, in turn, leads to either a waste of seedlings — therefore time, money and effort as the seeds could have been stored for the next planting season. It results in overcrowding of seedlings which are then quite unable — due to competition for nutrients, water and sunlight — to thrive and crop as they should. All plants, edible and otherwise, require a certain amount of space in which to develop to their full potential. Giving it to them makes sense.

Over-feeding:

If the soil has been correctly prepared before planting commences, there is no need to waste time, money and labour on perpetually feeding plants with one thing or the other. It must be stressed that over-feeding is detrimental to plant health, not beneficial. It encourages plants to grow at an unnatural rate, to an unnatural size and this actively reduces their cropping and disease-resistant performance.

Over-watering:

It is a common fact that more plants are killed off or develop fungal diseases from over-watering than from any other cause — with over-feeding running a very close second. Wasting copious amounts of increasingly precious water on everything in your garden every day is sheer lunacy. Different species of plants have different water requirements and few — aside from tender leafed species such as lettuce during periods of hot weather — need to be watered daily. Water only in evenings, never in a morning as the sun then quickly evaporates water before plants have had time to take up the potential benefit. Check soil moisture content by sticking your finger in the earth first. The top layer may be dry but it may still be moist just an inch below the surface where plant roots are, in which case there is no water needed. It is a good and labour -saving idea to plant species with similar water requirements close to each other. Planting thirsty and drought tolerant species in the same bed does not make good gardening sense.

Over-weeding:

Some gardeners, in attempts at creating a ‘picture perfect’ garden, spend hours and hours hoeing or hand-weeding. However, if beneficial layers of mulch have been applied and kept topped up as necessary, weeding is relegated, almost but not 100 percent, to being a thing of the past. If, in the absence of mulch, weeding is necessary, allow the weeds to grow at least three to four inches high so that they, as long as they have not reached the seeding stage of course, are useful additions to the compost heap / bin.

Over-producing:

Before planting it is wise — irrespective of how many relatives and friends you have waiting — to work out which vegetables, fruits and herbs are worth growing and how much you can use. Check out how much of which fresh produce you use on a weekly basis and then, this is eminently sensible, think of the cost of each one too. Unless you have tons and tons of space in which to produce all the organic food you need, it is wise to opt to grow those which are highest priced in the market rather than those that, in season, are relatively cheap. Producing usable amounts of expensive items makes far more sense that having, for example, a garden full of cabbages that no one wants to eat.

Over-maintaining:

Showpiece gardens can be costly to create, expensive and labour-intensive to maintain and, whilst they may be beautiful, they are a luxury few can afford so do not try to replicate them. It is far better to create a useful garden, minus all the difficult to care for fiddly bits, which produces lots of organic food and in which you also have time to simply chill out and just ‘Be’. Think about this and you will realise that it does make sense!

Please continue sending your gardening queries to zahrahnasir@hotmail.com. Remember to include your location. The writer does not respond directly by email. Emails with attachments will not be opened.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, January 15th, 2017