Help Your Garden Thrive With A Simple Upgrade To Your Daily Routine

While gardening is a highly rewarding practice, it can also be quite exhausting, causing even the most ardent arborists to experience burnout. If you're finding it difficult to get in the dirt, or feeling like your plants haven't been responding well to your schedule lately, it may be time to slow down, take a break, and learn to fall back in love with your craft. That's where this surprisingly simple upgrade comes in: eating breakfast in your garden. It may sound silly at first, but there's actually some real science behind why this works. Taking a moment to be present, mindful, and quietly observing your garden can help you to form better routines, develop consistent patterns, and pick up on your garden's specific needs. 

Plants tend to thrive when they receive steady, prolonged attention, rather than a quick splash of water when you get home from work. Most gardeners already know that speaking out loud to plants is scientifically proven to aid growth and fight against infections. Though this has more to do with the vibrations from speech than your literal presence, it stands to reason that the more time you spend around your saplings the better. Some home horticulturists recommend spending one to three minutes in your garden per square foot of growing space every week. This means a garden of roughly 35 square feet will require somewhere from 35 to 105 minutes of care weekly. That's plenty of time to sit back, enjoy a slice of avocado toast, and finish your morning coffee as you tend to your space.

Needless to say, breakfast in the garden is about much more than a simple meal. It's designed to help you to form minor, almost unconscious habits over the course of the week, such as pulling stray weeds or refreshing your garden's mulch wherever necessary. Once you get into the habit of absent-mindedly tending to your plants while enjoying the most important meal of the day, you may find that your love of gardening has become completely reinvigorated. It should go without saying that this morning ritual should be completed without a cell phone or computer screen, which would serve as a major distraction from the meditative experience. Still, you're more than welcome to play some of your favorite music as you prune leaves, spritz stems, and make keen observations about the needs of your plants. 

Even if you only intend to spend a few fleeting moments sipping coffee in your garden each morning, you should still be able to take some mental notes of what needs to be done. Still, it's best to avoid watering mistakes by watering early whenever possible. Most plants prefer to absorb water before the heat of the afternoon sets in, and disperse moisture into the soil as the day carries on. Watering first thing in the morning helps to mitigate fungal diseases, and the morning is the best time of day to spot potential pest activity so you can banish pests such as roaches and aphids from your space. These critters tend to explore during the wee hours of the morning, so you'll want to beat them to the punch.