Messy is good. Sure, you have a messy house and perhaps a messy life, and you might not find those to be good. However, a garden is one of those things that does not need to be perfectly tidy.
First, there’s soil. What’s tidy about soil, anyway? It’s all right for soil to be untidy. In fact, if you have a good layer of leaves over your soil in the fall and winter months, it will keep everything underneath just a little bit warmer during the winter months. Add some new compost to the garden in the spring, and if it’s full of a few bits and pieces that didn’t quite compost, so much the better for the worm life in your garden.
Do you have a garden wall or a few unsightly pieces of log hanging around? Excellent! These are perfect hiding places for bugs, also known as invertebrates. Now, some of these animals might try to eat your garden, this is true. However, many of them eat the bugs that eat your garden. There’s a whole ecosystem waiting to be found in a garden that’s a little messy.
Does your garden lack neat rows? Mine too. But that’s ok, because an unorganized garden contains wonderful habitats for bugs, birds, and bees – the animals that help maintain your garden for you. Blank spots in the garden call out to the weeds, and the weeds are only too happy to come when called. Of course you need to make sure that all of your plants have room to grow, but you don’t need to garden in neat rows with blank soil in the middle either.
If you look out into your messy garden in the spring time and despair, don’t fret. Nature is messy and you can be messy when you work with her. Gardening works well that way.
Image courtesy of vavoom09 at Stock Exchange.