Use the ‘Right Timing’ Approach for Garden and Farm Tasks

Learn when it's the best time for seeding, weeding, mulching and what to use on your garden.

By Sarah Joplin
Updated on June 7, 2021
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Sarah Joplin

They say that timing is everything. When we endeavor to garden and farm successfully, we are especially well served by striving to do the right thing at the right time. Best practices incorporate right timing as a key component. As a sort of New Year’s Resolution, I decided to try to aim for right timing in my day to day and it has gotten me thinking about this a lot. While it may not be everything, there is certainly a case to be made for the importance of things happening when circumstances are optimal.

Cultivating this paradigm requires heightened awareness and a willingness to respond to right timing on its own terms. We so often plan projects according to our free time, our budget, even our desires and whims. The “Right Timing” gardening and farming approach is instead based on looking and listening, paying attention to what is happening in the natural environment rather than what we want to be happening.

I’ve endeavored to act on right timing in the following areas.

Seeding

Each year in late winter, I get itchy to start on the garden. By late February if I haven’t been able to get my hands in the dirt, my mood gets agitated and frustration starts to build. March certainly seems time to dive into seeding and planting even though snows are often still falling and our last frost date isn’t until mid-April. My mind says one thing while Mother Nature rules supreme.

I’ve started seeds in March in my potting shed-makeshift “greenhouse.” Time and again, I get spotty or poor germination. The plants that do sprout struggle and grow leggy. Even with hardening them off slowly outside, they always undergo shock and are stunted when I plant them in the garden ground.

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