Spring’s Here & I Need To Face My Physical Limitations of Gardening

As the fog rolls in this morning, I took a tour outside and looked over my hypertufa pots and other plantings in my garden and it looks like Spring is really here! Sometimes it seems that it’s a long time coming, and other times it seems as if we just finished the beautiful colors of fall. But I am very anxious to get out there and start making changes. ( Yes, I am a re-arranger.)

See my update at bottom on how this went.

This spring we have decided on some changes outdoors and in some ways I am glad about it. But then other times, it makes me feel depressed. You see, my daughter and I ran the numbers and then had several landscaping companies come out and give us estimates. We have decided that the major work this year will be done by a landscaping crew since we are just not able to keep up anymore.

You see, it is a combination of my daughter’s long working hours and then add that to my physical capabilities and limitations. I just am not a young gardener, not even a middle-aged gardener anymore. I just cannot manage some of the larger jobs and my daughter doesn’t have the time. So we have decided to go with the professionals.

Have you had experience with the professional crews coming to do your yards and landscaping needs? We are having them do the spring weeding and mulching and they will spread a weed prevention on the soil. I am having them remove the two Viburnum lantana “Mohican” on the side of the garage since they are dying out and getting tacky looking. We already removed one of them that died.

The Dwarf Korean lilac will need pruned. It is on the hillside and I cannot do that. It is very steep over there and if you have seen some of my videos you will know that I can’t manage that hill…much less with a cutting blade or hedge trimmer in my hand!

Also needing trimmed is the Japanese Maple out front and the Dappled Willow out back. You see, I just can’t do those things at all. They’ll trim all the boxwood and spirea. Oh, and cut in all the mulched beds.

( Wow, when I put it all out like that I wonder how we’ve done it for the last two springs. We never tried trimming trees, I must say. But mulching was a real killer!)

Admitting That I Can’t Is Hard

I do feel bad that I have to admit that I just can’t do that physically demanding gardening that I used to do without thinking about it. And it is getting hard to manage the Portland cement and soil bags and lifting and leaching all my hypertufa. But I will continue to do that, although with smaller projects, of course. Maybe I could persuade my son to make me just one more BIG ONE! We’ll have to see.

They already carry my bags of Portland Cement at 94 lbs each. Can’t you just see the joy on their faces when I need a new bag? Out of the trunk of the car, into the house and down the stairs and over into my garden shop. I really owe them a lot!

Maybe I could cut down and make smaller ones…or less pots altogether. Well, maybe…we’ll see.

Spring 2021 Update:

Well, it didn’t go well and I was very disappointed, to say the least. The landscape company we hired had a good reputation and they do the yards in this neighborhood a lot. But I was so disappointed when they finished.

Here’s the good parts:

They did mulch well around our garden beds

They did take out the bushes and grind the stumps for full removal, trimmed the

trees and shrubs.

They “Preened” the beds to prevent weeds, etc.

Here’s the bad parts:

They edged the gardens beds…by about 15 inches!! Basically removed most of the new sodding we had just put in the previous year to narrow down the beds a bit!

One of the helpers “weeded” my hypertufa planters. They don’t know my plants so I

lost moss, tiny ferns, and quite a bit of new regrowth of deciduous sedums. No discussion was ever done about weeding inside my planters! I never even knew that COULD happen!

Also when they took out bushes at side of garage, they also took out all the creeping phlox they I had spent two years growing! Grrrr….!

Not a good experience. If I had not been sick the day they came, maybe I could have prevented some of it. But don’t they ask what you really want? My bad for making assumptions.

By the way, that company did NOT come back anymore. I hired a new landscape company for the remainder of chores through the year.