Is gardening outdated

[BulbsAndLampsDiffer]

I live on an estate, on my road I am generally surrounded by couples/ single mums in their 30s and 40s. I am single mum try to maintain my garden both front and rear, paining fences, mowing the lawn and general weeding, so very cheap and easy. However when looking around I feel like the only one to be doing do with lots of weeds on driveways and un mown front gardens. I know it’s not a priority in modern busy life.
For convex some one said to me years ago it is impossible to have a tidy home, tidy child and tidy mum. And I do let myself slip in order to keep my home and child looking put together.
No judgment just curious if where I live is the norm.
YABU too busy to pull up weeds
YANBU pride in your garden

If you plant well you don't get weeds. We have a big garden but rarely weed. You need to plant ground cover.

It depend on priorities. People always prioritise things they enjoy.

I love pottering in my small garden on a warm summer evening so I make time for it.

Loving the photos posted here!

They don't have to be manicured

But flowers and a lot of shrubs are good for wildlife and weeds on the path don't achieve anything but a scruffy look

I LOVE your garden!

This. Thats my excuse anyway 😂.

Also you dont know what's going on behind the scenes. I've got 2 toddlers and about to have my 3rd baby. The inside of my house was an absolute wreck when I moved in so been focusing on that.

Difficult to garden with young babies especially when they need alot of supervision and you have no sleep and any burst of energy you get is used for either sorting inside the house or taking kids out for a nice day.

Ive spoken to NDN on either side and apologised that I haven't got it under control (and it was out of control long before I moved in) and they were very sympathetic and sounded genuinely honest when they said they couldn't care less.

Ive got bigger things in my life to think about than whether someone has a few harmless weeds in their garden.

Id LOVE it to look nice, but right now its low on my priority list, and tbh id probably never have it totally manicured as I care about the environment and wont use weed killer or slug pellets for example.

An hour a week wouldn't do much with keeping our garden under control.

It takes that to cut the grass - not a stealth boast, we live in one of those ex council houses with a large oddly shaped garden with 3 different lawned areas with grass that grows very thick and fast so fills a large wheelie bin and then some of cut grass each fortnight ( 2 cuttings, need to crush it down after it's rotted a bit) to get the second cut in as it's only emptied fortnightly).

Then there's at least 20 metres of tall privet hedge that needs cutting a minimum of twice a year, preferably 3 times and another 30 metres of fencing, most of which backs onto unadopted land that is mostly inaccessible due to overgrown weeds and brambles that grow through the fence. And all the weeds that grow through the block paving and path at the side of the house

If anyone wants to come round and show me how to control it in an hour a week, be my guest.

There's plenty of bio diversity in my garden, plants for pollination,pond,big veg plot, unfortunately now the neighbours fir trees are 80 foot tall, keeping the sun off my veg and leaching out water from the soil, even after several days solid rain, everything underneath them is bone dry most of my plants and shrubs have died. The others have had ermine moth 5 years running,I don't care about their trees, but I don't want mine killed off. Oh yes and the rubbish,rusty car 6 years now.

@Bjorkdidit

Many post war council houses have larger than average gardens. This is what we live in. It also backs onto undeveloped land so there's a parcel of weeds and brambles that isn't maintained and just grows through our fence. We moved from a back to back with only a small yard and had no idea how much work it would be to keep up with.

Yep this is me to a tee

Keep going OP. It's having pride in and creating nice surroundings at your home. I think it's infectious in that if one person in a street makes an effort others can start to do it too. I love passing a cared for property.

YANBU OP, and good on you for everything you are doing. I love gardening, I focus on raking in the Autumn/Winter and cutting back, weeding, mowing and watering in Summer. My children help with the raking and watering. I feel instantly better after even half an hour out in my garden. Like you, I’ve recently re-painted all of our fence panels, and I enjoy the look of it so much whenever we are out there.

Keep enjoying the rewards of your hard work, you are doing great and will have a garden to enjoy and be proud of 😊

@Bjorkdidit I'm not going to claim you'll get it down to an hour a week, but you will save time if you just leave the grass clippings to mulch on the lawn instead of gathering & binning them.

I'm a gardener by trade and would definitely prefer that people totally let their garden run to weeks and ruin than tarmac over it, create a sea of chippings, chop down hedges during bird nesting season or put down plastic grass.

It's one thing to not garden but another to have no regard at all for the environment.

I absolutely love gardening but it was low priority at one point when the DC were small and we had sick parents to deal with so I fully understand why some people don’t do it. I tried hard to get my DC to enjoy helping in the garden from when they were tiny but they didn’t like it and I remember not liking helping my Dad in the garden when I was small.

It’s good that gardening trends have evolved to a more naturalistic style but I think there is a bit of a dichotomy going on with some people leaning towards that and others going the astroturf and fake plant route.

Can’t remember who said about painting fences but it is worth looking on FB marketplace etc. On mine at the moment someone is giving away pots of it. Same for tools, definitely worth keeping an eye out and also see if there is a local one for seed and plants. We have one that is great and all sorts of things get given away plus there is a seed library in local library where you can get free seeds.

I love my garden, but, to cut down on the work, have let some areas go wild - they are very pretty - lots of varieties of grasses which are very beautiful - and flowers like oxeye daisies and chicory have seeded. They are habitats for lots of wild life too.

Front gardens around here are well kept but back gardens are a different matter - some pristine, some jungle!

We have an intentionally wild garden to try to mitigate the huge biodiversity collapse that will otherwise happen in plastic-grassland.’Weeds’ are actually hugely important wild flowers - for example dandelions give bees the earliest nectar of the year before other flowers bloom.

I love gardening. Right from my first tiny space I've wanted to create and make it look nice just as I did the house
I worked full time with 2 DC and little money. I bought 1 plant a month from the man on the market.
I have stocked my current garden with reduced plants from Homebase that just needed a bit of water and tlc

@RosesAndHellebores what a wonderful garden. My in laws devoted all their time to their garden and it showed. I have only just started taking an interest and have a small town garden. But I’ve loved to see the salvias and geraniums I’ve planted thrive and a tiny fatsia in a shady corner has grown into a monster feature in a year. When I asked for help on here for planning a border, I was told that gardening is all about hope and that’s a great sentiment.

my 6 sq m front garden was freshly planted this spring (except the Santolina which has been there for a couple of years). The grasses are quite small at the moment but they’ll knit together next year and then it’ll be a very low maintenance front garden, which should take almost no work until some of the plants need splitting in 3-4 years. The bees are loving it.

(excuse the bad photo editing, I edited out my neighbours car).

I see my garden as another room so keep it tidy. I agree it's an awful.lot of effort and something I have only rece nrly enjoyed doing as my kids became teenagers and needed me less.

My favourite gardens are communal ones, where neighbours get together to green up the back lanes between terraces or to create a run of pretty front gardens. It must make the area so much friendlier, nicer to live in and make houses easier to sell.

Someone in our street set us all up to make a hedgehog highway of little passing places in fences, water bowls, feeding stations and no pesticides. Oh my goodness the joy of having baby hedgehogs in the garden is amazing. www.hedgehogstreet.org/help-hedgehogs/link-your-garden/

We always make sure the lawn is mown and there’s not weeds in the front garden etc. I have a few pots but not much else.

All of the proper gardeners I know are retired people

I don’t like gardening much so I pay someone a couple of hours a month to do any heavy digging and weeding and cut the lawn/deadhead flowers/remove greenfly myself. Works for me.

My front garden was ratty grass when I moved in. It took a day to dig it up and I put in some plants and then scattered seeds and, except for watering twice a week I did nothing else. This is it ten weeks later.