Maintenance

 Hi dear reader.

Today I continued showing Mike, my husband how grateful I am for his work in the garden by maintaining it. Here are the before and after shots of the top left section of the garden that I worked on today.

You can see I've kept the chain of hearts creeper in there as it was intentionally planted, while the chick weeds and clover have been removed.

Maintenance can be one of the hardest parts of a clean up journey. If you don't continue to maintain the areas that you have already worked in, it's one step forward and two steps backwards. And the more areas you clear up, the more you have to maintain, though it is a lot quicker to do swift tidy up and put things away than it is to have to clean, tidy and reorganise the whole area again.

If your maintenance isn't working, if it's taking too long as tidied areas become cluttered again too quickly, you will have to look at your habits. What do you use the area for? Is it really too much effort to take a few more steps to a different area where the item really belongs? 

I look at it this way; as I'm maintaining the areas, I am slowly building better habits.

For example, I haven't shown you our cat boxes for obvious reasons, but they used to get really dirty and we would fight over who had to clean them on the weekend. And the poor critters would urinate outside their box because it was too smelly and we made extra work for ourselves cleaning that up. Now I have a few jobs I do first thing in the morning. (I choose morning as it's when I'm most productive and my paid work takes place in the afternoon. Evening might work better for you). I now take about 20 minutes to unpack the dishwasher (usually while I'm waiting for the jug to boil and the tea to brew) and to scoop out the solid mess in the cat box. Every second day I scrape out the loose cat litter that has been scratched into saw dust. Since I started this, the cats have been happier - no messes and there has been no build up, so they don't get whiffy by the end of the week.

Yes that's 20 to 30 minutes each day. But the benefits have been terrific and I really hope to keep doing this so that it will become an established routine.

Maintenance is honestly much quicker and easier than leaving it to build up again.

I hope this has helped.

I'll keep you posted on how I persist with these habits...will they stick? I sure hope so.