5 Life Hacks to Help You Find More Time in the Garden

Do you wish you had more time to garden? Are kids, home and just life in general keeping you from the garden you love? I’ve been there. I’m still there from time to time. Here are my five favorite life hacks for creating time for the garden.

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Every spring like clockwork the comments appear in my Facebook feed about “time to garden– no clean house until fall” or something similar. Some of my friends have totally given up on a garden because they’re too busy and “it all ends up a big mess anyway”.

Life Hack #1: Plan for gardening time– with an actual planner

I know we’re talking gardening, but you can pretty much insert any desired activity in place of gardening here. Truth be told, I struggled for years to actually USE a planner. I wasted a lot of money on planners and time management systems over the years.

A lot of times I acted as if buying a new planner meant it would magically appear with all my life figured out on it’s pages, with unlimited time for the activities I love. Unfortunately I never did find a magic planner!

Maybe you’re like I was, and you figure, “Oh well I don’t need a planner, I can just make a to-do list.” Yeah, I tried that and all I did was make a giant to-do list from hell that just made me want to find the nearest source of chocolate. And I did find the nearest source of chocolate. Many times over.

Pare down your to-do list

I finally woke up and realized that the never-ending to-do list just puts me in shut-down mode. After this earth shattering revelation that maybe the planners I bought didn’t fit how my mind worked, I found the “Daily Docket” from Tsh Oxenreider on Art of Simple. It’s totally free and while she doesn’t personally use it anymore, she still offers it to readers.

I felt like a beam of sunshine poured onto my desk when I read through the “Daily Docket”. Instead of a to-do list a mile long, it’s limited to 10 things. Only 10. And each day you identify 3 “most important things” or M.I.T.s. And a separate space for meal planning– something that always slipped through the cracks more often than not for me.

The Daily Docket was a game-changer for me. It also has a space for writing out the general order of your day. I have a tendency to think I have more time than I do, so this feature was a real eye-opener.

For years I kept a paper or electronic calendar planner but also had a binder of Daily Dockets printed out to write in. It doesn’t take a long time to sit down and fill it in– and it is incredibly helpful to keep in mind as a guide to your day.

What do I use today?

Today, I use a mix of a paper and online planner. As a family, we use the online app Cozi to keep track of all our schedules. In either the free or paid version, you can color code the calendar for each family member and their activities. There are also shared shopping lists– which are worth their weight in gold.

My Living Well planner open to the weekly planning pages. Seeing the week all in one place helps identify what time I do or don’t have.

For all of my work, home, and garden planning I use the Living Well Planner. It has a lot of the same elements as the Daily Docket, like the 3-item “most important things” list and space for meal planning. What I love about it more than the Daily Docket is I can look at my entire week in a two page spread and see exactly what time I do (or don’t) have once I plug in all our obligations for the week.

I know that there are online planners that I could just cut/paste or type everything into, but something about the act of writing on actual paper is key for me.

It turns out this is not just one of my quirks, but the act of writing down versus typing the same information engages your brain differently making it easier to organize, synthesize and retain the information. So if you keep forgetting things despite using a digital planner, maybe going old-school paper can help!

I also love that the Living Well Planner incorporates goal setting and budgeting into each month’s set of pages. Plus the planner comes undated. There’s a sheet of label stickers included so you can just start the planner wherever you are when you purchase it.

There are sets of sticky notes that go along with the goal setting and daily schedules that I find extremely helpful when time is tight. Having a checklist of “what comes next” really helps me keep moving forward.

Regardless of what planner you use, find a way to view your available time each week. Realistically. Maybe you have a whole afternoon you can devote to gardening (lucky you!) or maybe you just have 30 minutes or an hour.

When you are realistic with your available time, you can be realistic with what you want to accomplish (hopefully). I struggle with this. But having a handle on your time, and limiting the size of your to-do list does help.

Life Hack #2: Establish routines

One of the biggest things that has made life in general easier, kids or no kids, whether gardening or doing any other thing I want to do is establishing routines. I am a person that falls down the rabbit holes of life on the daily. And I’m also a recovering perfectionist. Which is a recipe for disaster some days.

I’m the person that goes to get an apple out of the fridge and notices some past-its-prime produce that needs to go to the compost bin. In a blink of an eye I’ve emptied the fridge for a deep clean and the entire morning has evaporated in an instant.

Years ago a fellow perfectionist suggested the Flylady website to me. It was such a Godsend. Flylady’s method revolves around using routines. Take any task, for any part of your daily life and break it out into steps and assign them to days or times. It works for laundry, and it works for gardening too.

I printed my “Weekly Home Blessing” on a pretty background and put it in a frame. I use a dry erase marker to check the boxes off as I do them each week. At the end of the week, wipe it off and start again!

But more importantly, it simplifies all the inside tasks so you can get them done and get outside in the garden.

One of the most useful routines for me is the Flylady’s “Home Blessing Hour”. It’s a list of 7 tasks to be done in 10 minutes or less– she recommends setting a timer and stopping wherever you are when the timer beeps– which, if you’re a recovering perfectionist like me– takes practice! The tasks are basically the things that make our homes look halfway decent and keep us from living in total squalor.

I took the original “Home Blessing Hour” and rewrote it to fit our home. It’s printed out as a checklist with a pretty background in a frame above my kitchen sink. I use a dry erase marker to check off our tasks each week. If you’re a person that loves checking off things from a list like I do, you know how super-motivating this can be!

Favorite Flylady-ish Resources:

The book “Sink Reflections” by the Flylady (Marla Cilley) opened up a whole new world to me. Reading this book was the start of me understanding and getting past my perfectionism.
I also enjoyed her book “The C.H.A.O.S. Cure” although a lot of the information is already in “Sink Reflections”. But there are some additional golden advice nuggets here so I think it’s definitely worth reading.
I found many unique cleaning products through Flylady that have made cleaning take a lot less time. My favorites are microfiber cloths and the Rubba Scrubba. The Rubba Scrubba is excellent for cleaning out flower pots!
One of the best lessons I learned from Flylady to make it easier to clean is to 1) pare down the cleaning products to as few as possible and 2) keep a set of cleaning products in the places you do a lot of cleaning. For me, I have a set of cleaning products in each bathroom and the kitchen. So if I want to do a quick clean up, everything I need is already within an arm’s reach.
As part of keeping cleaning products to a minimum, AND reducing the amount of plastic waste our household produces, I recently started using Truman’s cleaning products. Products are shipped as little cartridges that fit into an empty spray bottle that you will with tap water. The cartridge is recyclable. If you’re curious, this link gives you 50% off the purchase of the starter kit.

Life Hack #3: Meal Planning

I love to cook. But as a parent of young children, kid meltdown time always seems to come right when I’m trying to cook dinner. Now while I have gotten exceptionally talented at cooking with one hand with a kid on my opposite hip– that’s not ideal.

Add in summer and the garden, and there’s absolutely no way I want to struggle with trying to convince my kids to come inside so I can make dinner. The truth is, if I’ve managed to get everyone outside and occupied and I’m busy in the garden– I don’t really want to come inside to cook dinner either!

Besides the gauntlet of tired, cranky kids to contend with, I struggled for years to consistently know what we were having for dinner before dinnertime came around. Even though my cabinets and fridge were full of food.

There was a day in late 2016 that I had reached my limit. Once again I cleaned out a liquified drawer of produce from my fridge and my inner critic had a field day ripping myself to shreds about wasting MORE food and MORE money.

In 2017 my New Year’s resolution was to get serious about meal planning. Doesn’t that sound like the ultimate mom/adult resolution? But seriously, it’s made a huge difference in the chaos level in our household.

I don’t do anything fancy– I use the meal planning space in my Living Well Planner to list out our dinners for the week. And please don’t think I cook every day– I plan leftover days and dinner out days.

Breakfast and lunch are pretty much on autopilot in my house– I have a short list of breakfast foods I keep in stock, and lunches are either dinner leftovers or simple things like sandwiches, salad or the ever popular mac ‘n cheese for the kiddos.

Just having even a very simple plan helps reduce overbuying at the grocery store. I make notes on what I need for the week, and buy only that.

Other ways I streamline meals:

I use my Instant Pot or slow cooker to cook dinner, eliminating a good chunk of time at the stove.
I stock my freezer with meals that can go into the oven or Instant Pot/slow cooker. We have a local shop (Prep.Freeze.Cook.) that carries frozen meals already put together, but I make my own too.
I stock my pantry with simple meal ingredients, like pasta and sauce or soup mixes that just need some frozen veggies and/or meat.

Just a little time spent planning has saved me a lot of time rummaging around figuring out dinner or buying a bunch of food that goes to waste.

Favorite Meal Planning Resources:

The cookbook “Keepers” is one of two cookbooks that I own in both the paper and Kindle version. I refer to it that often. “Keepers” is more than a cookbook– the authors spend a lot of time on how to make cooking both healthier and more efficient– taking away the “I don’t have time to cook healthy” excuse.
My other go-to cookbook, which I also own in both paper and Kindle version is “Great Food Fast”. It’s a collection of recipes for electronic pressure cookers like my Instant Pot. One of my family’s favorite suppers, “Cheesy Chicken and Rice with Broccoli Florets”, is from this book. I keep the ingredients for it on hand at all times.
If you’re more of a slow-cooker fan, check out Stephanie O’Dea’s website where she documented cooking with a slow-cooker every day for a year. Her website includes meal plans and you can buy all her recipes in traditional printed cookbooks if that’s more your speed.
Keep a 3-ring binder and a box of page protectors handy for recipes. Sometimes I like to work off an online recipe on my phone, but I do appreciate having recipes printed out. Keeping recipes in plastic page protectors keep them clean which means I don’t have to waste paper printing them out multiple times.

Life Hack #4: Don’t waste time looking for your garden tools

Sound familiar? You have 30 minutes to spend in the flower bed where the weeds are threatening a hostile takeover– and you spend the first 20 minutes looking for your gloves, and something to put the weeds in.

Left to my own devices, I would have garden tools spread all over my garage. No horizontal surface would be spared.

My bucket of garden tools is ready to go at all times.

Years ago I got a fancy garden tool box with specific slots for specific tools. No tool ever made it back to its slot. Then I had a big bulky cart that held small as well as large tools. It was a bear to drag out, so it stayed in the garage most days.

Then at the end of one summer I found a bucket organizer on clearance. At the time, I’d never seen anything like it. But there are tons of different versions out there as you’ll see in the link above. It snaps in place around any 5-gallon bucket and has pockets that fit all the tools I use regularly. Plus you still have the bucket itself for storage.

Now it’s easy when I have a few minutes to grab a tool or the entire bucket and get started right away with whatever I’m working on. It’s organized enough that I can keep my tools in reasonable order without a lot of effort, and small enough that it’s not a chore to bring it along into the garden.

I limit the flower pots I keep to what fits on this cart. I still have a few large ones on the floor next to it, but the number of pots would be way worse without the cart!

To corral larger tools, we use a wheeled rack. I like that we can easily move it around the garage as needed, and it really holds quite a few tools.

We keep our large tools in one place with this wheeled rack.

I also use a heavy-duty kitchen cart with wheels to store pots and seed starting supplies. I limit my stash to what fits on the cart. This helps me and my tendency to save every pot that crosses my path.

Another option I plan to use in the future is to use a small mailbox or storage box out in the garden to store frequently used tools. I have some spots in the far-reaches of my yard that I never seem to have the right tool with me when I see an issue that needs to be addressed. It would be so great to have a few tools right there so I can seize the moment.

Life Hack #5: Pandemic or not, use an order ahead or delivery option for everyday errands

I never thought I’d be someone that would order ahead online for pickup. Ever. Honestly I used to roll my eyes a little every time I saw yet another store advertising online order pickup options.

But then, long before the COVID pandemic, I started working through a home management course that challenged participants to use these services to automate tasks and save time. So I tried it.

And? I’m not rolling my eyes anymore about online order pickup. I sat down and ordered my weekly Target run items online and picked them up at the front of the store– without getting sucked into any extra purchases. Without wrangling kids nonstop. In about 2 minutes.

Then I figured out how to use the “Drive Up” feature at Target. This option was so valuable to me over the winter when the Polar Vortex of below zero temperatures settled in. I didn’t have to take my toddler out in the cold. I just pulled up and someone from Target put my bags in my car. Awesome.

I’ve done online order pickup for other stores where I know that wrangling my kids will be an issue, or the whole store is a giant rabbit hole for me (Michael’s and JoAnn Fabrics I’m looking at you).

And of course I order my fair share from Amazon Prime. When my son was a baby and I was working full-time, I used their “subscribe and save” option to automatically deliver everything I could think of. I just didn’t have the time to shop in person. It was a lifesaver, but I did have to keep a close eye on whether my intervals for reorders were correct.

Gardening with a baby in the house is not for the faint of heart either. If you’re in this life chapter, check out my post with my favorite hacks for getting out in the garden with a baby or small child.

If you’re frustrated and can’t seem to find time for your garden, I challenge you to try one of these hacks for a week. Let me know if it helps. Maybe you have some hacks of your own that you’d like to share. Tell me all about them at jen@groundedandgrowing.com. I look forward to hearing from you!

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