The Tired Gardener

Healing Through Growing

Activities For Tired Gardeners

On this page I offer suggestions for activities that will help you to engage with nature whatever your level of energy, knowledge of growing or access to a garden. Use the categories filters to find activities that suit your energy level, growing space and the current season.

Before you do this, please click here for some important guidance on how to manage your energy and ensure that your growing remains a joy rather than becoming a drain.

  • Fennel flowers.
  • Coriander flowers.
  • Yellow fennel in the corner of the veg bed.

Sow Your Own Spices

A small patch of coriander can produce enough seed for home grown curries throughout the year. People assume that such exotic ingredients must be extremely complicated to grow; you don’t need to tell them how easy it really was.


  • Oops! I've sown too many again.
  • Do you have a sunny windowsill with space for lots of pots?
  • Take your time over sowing.

Sow Tomato Seeds

Few foods taste as good as home-grown tomato, but make sure you don’t get carried away with the excitement of easy seed sowing. Plan ahead to avoid exhaustion and disappointment and tomatoes will reward your foresight.

  • Blackcurrants.
  • Sitting down to strip the fruit from blackcurrant canes.
  • Canes ready for stripping.

Harvest Blackcurrants

If you have a blackcurrant bush in your garden, here is an easy approach to combining pruning and harvesting, which will save you energy and time.

  • Dough rising (proving) in a banneton.
  • Successful sourdough loaves.
  • A less successful sourdough edible discus. My first attempt.

Bake a Sourdough Loaf

Making sourdough is a skill that takes time and practice, but you can have a lot of fun perfecting your loaves and enjoying the results.

  • An active starter that has risen and dropped in the container, leaving a tide mark.
  • Starter cultures produce carbondioxide bubbles, which make your bread rise. They also produce alcohol and lactic acid, seen here dissolved in water as clear 'hooch'. This is normal.
  • Ready to cook with.

Grow a Sourdough Bread Starter

Sourdough bread is made from a culture of the wild yeasts and beneficial bacteria that live in the flour, the air and on every surface.  Learn how to grow your own culture for pennies ready to make delicious bread.  All you need is flour, water and somewhere warm to keep your starter.

Watch a 'How To' video here

  • Supermarket basil after rescuing.
  • Un-potted, overcrowded basil plants.
  • Tear the root ball in half.

Grow Your Own Basil

Rescuing supermarket basil plants is satisfying, easy and gives you the chance to try the key gardening skill of ‘potting on’.  The plants from one pot can keep you in basil for months.

Watch a 'How To' video here

  • Blackcurrant canes in summer.
  • Blackcurrants.

Plant a Blackcurrant Bush

Winter is the season for planting bare root fruit bushes, and blackcurrants are a great crop for a beginner to start with.

  • Plaited garlic.
  • A garlic bulb with another, divided into cloves, ready for planting. Look for the flat plate at one end, where the roots will grow from, and the papery point at the other, which will produce a leaf shoot.

Grow Your Own Garlic

Garlic is delicious, has many healing properties and is incredibly easy to grow.

  • Containers ready for the new crop.
  • Tip the watercress out of its tub and look at the roots.
  • Split the root-ball into smaller pieces.

Easy Watercress

Potting on supermarket ‘Living Salads’ gives you lots of quick, cheap, healthy plants.

© 2020 Alison McGrath Contact Me