Gardening hiatus shows how minutes add up to hours

A snip here. A bit of pruning there. A quick staking job. Pulling a weed that has popped up out of nowhere.

These are the little jobs that gardeners do every day while passing through the garden. They are mostly mindless tasks that a gardener recognizes and accomplishes often while on the way to do something else.

A good way to judge just how much of this mindless garden work is being done is to leave your garden in the middle of summer.

I recently returned to my garden to find something that looked more like a jungle than the garden I’d left eight days before, despite the excellent care of a garden caretaker. Even though the garden had been routinely looked after, containers and new plantings watered and egregious weeds excised, all those little jobs I was doing with a cup of coffee in one hand or on the way to the car were adding up to a lot of work.

Heavy rain, which my newly purchased, old-fashioned rain gauge measures as always being more than the fancy digital weather station I can review from my phone, certainly contributed to aggressive growth in my absence, as well as the dreaded flop.

The ‘Annabelle’ hydrangeas, which were a glorious upright stand reaching 5 feet tall when I left, were of course laying on the ground. I should have known better, since there is no force on Earth that will keep Annabelles standing upright in full bloom when rain finally arrives. If gardening has taught me anything, it’s that I am, at heart, an optimist, because there’s no other explanation for thinking something is going to stand up year after year only to watch it flop over.

Similarly the tomatoes were a bit of a mess, but there is no avoiding this in midsummer unless you check them almost daily. Leave them to their own devices for a week and you’ll spend a good amount of time untangling the mess, pruning out suckers and carefully encouraging branches to point the right direction.

In other parts of the garden, pruning is the name of the game. Perennials that don’t offer much in the way of interest after flowering need to be chopped back, and annuals with robust growth need to be kept in check to allow their neighbors to have a bit of space.

My typical weekly work, added up minutes at a time, might have been constrained to the trug I leave out for such things and empty when needed. But a massive garden cleanup after time away requires a wheelbarrow and pitchfork to pick up the piles I leave in my wake. It’s a most satisfying mess.

Stepping away from a garden is also a good way to judge the time it takes for it to recover. Before I left I cut every dahlia, snapdragon, sweet pea and cosmos flower that was in bloom and returned to a garden in full color, and more handfuls of sweet peas for helpful neighbors.

It turns out that time works a little differently in the garden. Minutes add up to more than hours, one little snip at a time.