Quick and Easy Gardening

Gardening doesn’t have to be hard or time consuming. If you have limited time available for planting and caring for your garden, Mr Fothergill’s have a number of solutions for quick and easy gardening.

Gardening Style

The style of garden you choose is going to dictate whether you have to spend hours every week maintaining your plants or if they only require work here and there. Formal gardens with long hedges and straight edges require regular trimming and weeding to stay in check whereas rustic free flowing cottage gardens display the beauty in imperfection, often with a mishmash of flowers and bulbs that regrow the following season or self-sow in the garden. Some easy low maintenance flowers you can add into your cottage garden include cosmos, alyssum, marigold, lavender,sunflowers and nasturtium.

When it comes to vegetable gardens naturally, they are going to require more work than a patch of lawn. In saying that they are well worth the reward when you have fresh food readily available. To make the process easier try out a no-dig vegetable garden and build up the organic matter in your patch with quality composts and mulch. No-dig gardens build rich healthy soil that doesn’t require flipping or turning with a shovel, saving your back and your time. Some easy care crops to add into the veggie garden include beans, snowpeas, lettuce, beetroot, pak choi and spring onion.

For the ultimate no-fuss garden why not set up a native wildflower garden. Australian native plants require very little attention once established as they have low nutrient requirement. Natives are also drought tolerant so you can save precious time and resources with little to no additional watering required. Check out the full range of Australian native seed here.

Propagating

With the right equipment, you can take the time and hassle out of propagating your seeds. If you struggle to sprinkle seeds accurately in neat rows try out some of the Mr Fothergill’s Seed Tapes & Mats. With these products, the seed is embedded into a thin paper mat or tape that degrades in the ground. All you have to do is...

The seed mats come in a range of delicious herbs including basil, chives, coriander & parsley which are all wonderful low maintenance crops. Seed tapes work in a very similar way and come in 5m long strips for perfectly straight rows. The seeds are precisely spaced, virtually eliminating the need for thinning which is great for veggies like carrot and radish! Check out the full range here.

Jiffy Peat Pots & Pellets are also a useful item to have in your toolkit to make seed sowing a breeze. The pots and pellets allow plant roots to grow through the sides which means they are never pot bound, giving them the best start to life. All you have to do is...

Automate your garden

Once you have decided on your preferred style of garden and sowed your seeds why not work on automating parts of your garden. Though this can take some time to set up it will save you hours in the long run. Try out the following:

• Install a drip irrigation system in thirsty areas of the garden. This is great around your vegetables in the summertime. Include a timer on your tap too and the drippers will automatically run.
• Use slow release fertilisers around your veggies, fruit trees and shrubs. This saves you from remembering to apply liquid feeds every fortnight providing steady growth over a longer period.
• Apply mulch as much as possible. Mulch is amazing at suppressing weeds, retaining moisture and improving your soils organic matter. It really does a lot of the work for you!