Gardening burnout happens when a garden becomes so much more work than you can keep up with and a source of disappointment — one disaster after another — rather than a source of joy. It’s the feeling of not just being overwhelmed but wanting to give up gardening altogether (at least for now). This week, I identify the sources of gardening burnout and the adjustments gardeners can make so they never get to that point.
This year, the garden was particularly challenging for gardeners all over the United States and farther afield. Pretty much everywhere I was turning, I found people talking about gardening burnout and how difficult 2024 was compared to any other year. We’ve all felt overwhelmed with gardening at some point if we’ve been doing it for any length of time at all. Garden overwhelm can creep in on us, and it’s the same with gardening burnout. So I wanted to discuss how to recognize it, where it comes from and how to avoid it or manage it.
Both the decisions we make and a number of factors that are outside of our control, such as adverse weather, can lead to gardening burnout — the desire to quit altogether. Keeping a garden manageable in size and complexity will alleviate feelings of being burned out.
It’s okay to feel not okay with your gardening results this year. Some people felt guilty that they didn’t get it all done or didn’t do things they needed to do to keep their garden looking okay. The reality is that gardening responsibilities can become too much.
In my Online Gardening Academy™, one of our students, Beth, who gardens and lives in the Pacific Northwest, chimed in with a post that was simply titled Gardening Burnout:
“I love the optimism of gardening. I delight in each seedling coming out of the soil. I just spent four to five days finding space in my existing garden for my first try at fall gardening. Honestly, I hope the fall garden requires as little as advertised. I’m tired. Started seeds in February, busy all summer. How do you keep this up all year long? It seems like a lot of pressure. I love going through seed catalogs in January when there is nothing going on. How do you do it?”
Little did she know at the time of that post that it would generate so many replies from fellow students and gardeners of all levels. This was happening all over the country and beyond.
Gardening burnout is nothing new. In the many years that I’ve been in the public arena for gardening, it just isn’t something that has been brought up very much because I’m not sure we’ve really had a year quite like we’ve had this year, mostly due to weather. And there is no way to avoid what Mother Nature’s throwing at us, whether it’s too hot or too wet or too cold or too dry. Those are challenges as gardeners that we’re facing as they happen.
And in fact, I will share with you something that may surprise you. For the first time in the history of my gardening life —which goes back to age 8 — I half-jokingly acknowledged a hint of gardening burnout for me in my garden here in zone 8a, near Atlanta, Georgia.
Tobi, my farm manager, and I were out in the garden a few weeks ago dealing with the cleanup of the mess and overgrowth that happens when you go on vacation for a week or it’s just so hot that you don’t feel like getting out there every day. Things will take a turn, and it doesn’t go unnoticed when you get back out there.
Tobi and I were talking about it and, half-jokingly, I said, I think next year I’m just going to skip growing vegetables and do all flowers in these beds because the flowers seem to cooperate and play much more nicely, blooming their little hearts out and not really providing disease challenges and other issues that many of the food crops were doing.
Tobi looked at me, laughed and said, “You know, I was thinking about the exact same thing.”
We were on the same page. We hadn’t talked about it up to that point at all, but secretly we were both feeling the same thing and acknowledging it together in real time.
Now the truth is that will probably never happen next summer. I will have forgotten about this year’s pain points and I’ll be hard at it again, starting in late January or early February, sowing my seeds, business as usual. But in all honesty, for me, who has been gardening that long and managing a garden, it’s probably too big for one or even two people to manage year after year, combined with the pressure of it being a public-facing garden that’s often photographed and filmed.
Liz Ross, another student in the Online Gardening Academy, shared something that resonated with me. She said, ‘My urge to dig my hands in the soil is almost as strong as my urge to breathe.” Same here, Liz, and well said.
My vegetable garden is large, with 16 growing beds and a perimeter of flowers. Even for two people — Tobi and me working together — it’s a lot of work to keep up with.
Garden Overwhelm vs. Gardening Burnout
The first thing I want to address as we begin this conversation is how does burnout happen, and is it the same as garden overwhelm? My contention is that they are not the same.
The dictionary defines overwhelm as bury or drown beneath a huge mass, and defines burnout as the physical or mental collapse caused by overwork or stress.
Overwhelm is just feeling like you can’t do it all, and I find it much easier to express a feeling of overwhelm than burnout. I’ve felt overwhelm a lot. To me overwhelm feels beatable — unlike burnout where you feel like you don’t want to keep trying. Burnout is feeling defeated.
I have experienced garden overwhelm when it comes to weeding. Not so much in my vegetable garden beds or in the pathways around them; I keep up with that very well. But because I have two and a half acres of native landscape beds and areas around our house, that’s a lot of space that needs weeding. And with our busy schedules, it’s very hard to get to everything. You almost feel paralyzed like you don’t even know where to begin.
I have done episodes with Margaret Roach of “A Way to Garden” on general garden overwhelm and specifically on weed overwhelm. We identified strategies to manage overwhelm, such as making a task list and capping how long you will work before you stop and walk away until another day.
Overwhelm is daunting, but you can wrap your head around it and come up with a plan to overcome it.
It’s not just fast-growing weeds that can become overwhelming. The crops you grow on purpose can do the same thing when they are producing so fast you just can’t keep up with all the harvesting or deadheading you need to do.
So when I look at my summer landscape beds overtaken by weeds, it is overwhelming, but it did not cause me to suddenly become burned out. I think burnout requires some time before it hits us.
Gardening burnout happens through repeated activity, and oftentimes it goes from a place of elation to emptiness, from enthusiasm to avoidance, from excitement to boredom or indifference — where you just don’t have the mental or physical energy to keep going.
We tend to repeat actions in the garden because we love doing them, but external factors like unfavorable weather can take the shine off those actions that previously brought such joy. One example is keeping up with watering during times of drought. It’s challenging and still doesn’t yield the happiest plants. Another example is trying to stay ahead of insect pest damage having only marginal results from your efforts.
Give yourself some grace and slack for starting to feel burned out.
Keeping up with weeds is a source of garden overwhelm that can lead to gardening burnout.
Cut Back
The summer is when you feel gardening burnout the most. Cutting back on your plans and plantings in the spring will make your summer go easier.
I have historically grown lots of tomato plants annually, but I’ve cut back. There have been times when I’ve grown 60 and 70 tomato plants, and I’m not sure why I do it other than I just love tomatoes and I love experimenting and trying different varieties.
Last year, I cut back to 16 tomato plants. That was huge for me, and I felt good about it. I still yielded plenty of tomatoes. In fact, I think I had as many on our kitchen counter as I’ve ever had, maybe because I was managing the harvest better.
This year I backslid and I ended up with 24 tomato plants, which is too many. It no doubt led to me feeling a little bit of burnout at the end of the season.
I tend to grow almost everything you can eat. But I don’t need to grow plants that I don’t enjoy growing or don’t really like to eat or don’t bring me pleasure during the growth process. For example, I’m not a huge fan of growing cucurbits such as winter squash, summer squash and cucumbers due to the prickliness of the leaves and the plants’ proneness to diseases and pests — at least where I live, in a hot and humid area. Since I am an organic gardener who doesn’t use synthetic pesticide sprays, I just pass on growing these disease and pest magnets. It’s an easy area to cut back in.
I have cut back in recent years on how many tomato plants I grow. It has been such a relief, and I still yield an abundance of tomatoes with fewer plants and less work.
Be More Realistic
Being unrealistic about how much time and energy you have for gardening is a primary reason for gardening burnout. You make it through your season and you hopefully take a break and enjoy the fall and the wintertime. And by the time spring rolls back around, you are gung-ho, ready to get back in that garden. And you don’t even remember the prior year and all the things you said you wouldn’t do, you’re doing again.
For those who are new to gardening, it’s even easier to underestimate how much time and effort all your big gardening plans will require.
A very active student in the Online Guardian Academy, Tom Fisher, in South Carolina, recommends grounding yourself in your personal gardening belief system. Why do you garden, and what purpose does it have in your life? He summed it up: “To do without a why is effort without purpose.”
Sometimes It’s Best Not to Press On
Marie in Northern California, Zone 10a, shared that being in a climate where seasons hardly exist and there is no real winter is a blessing and a curse. She can grow and harvest food year-round and doesn’t want to squander opportunities. At the same time, she doesn’t get any winter downtown from the garden.
“Planting, seed starting, growing, tending, harvesting, canning and processing I like it all, but yeah, it’s a lot,” Marie says. “And if I let it, it never stops. I find that I’ll prioritize my garden over all other hobbies and sometimes even walking with the dogs on days I run out of physical energy, to their dismay, and I have to catch myself. Is this healthy for me, or am I just living to meet the demands of my garden because I’m a gardener?
“Learning to set boundaries and saying no to opportunities is not failing, even if others seem to have all the time and or energy to do it,” she continues. “I have to work and learn to accept that one regularly. I have the good fortune of not suffering from scarcity. So if I don’t grow all the things, I can still buy food from someone else who did. And that’s okay. I remind myself that this is supposed to be enjoyable. So I try to do what I feel like doing and that’s it. I even don’t feel like I’m failing when I prioritize my needs — sometimes.”
Pressing on with gardening even when you’re exhausted can easily lead to gardening burnout. Sometimes we just don’t give ourselves enough slack. We don’t give ourselves a break and a little bit of latitude to take a breath and step back. We can always come back after we’ve taken a day or two off.
Avoid Getting into a Rut
If you’ve been gardening for years, you may get into the habit of planting what you know and growing it year after year after year. This can lead to the thrill of the chase being gone.
For experienced gardeners, we’ve been around this block a few times and we know what we’re going to get. Now that’s not a bad thing at all because we should be growing what we like to grow. But if we’re not expanding our boundaries and stretching to grow ourselves, mentally and physically, and raising the bar to be a better, smarter, more confident gardeners by trying new things, gardening may no longer be exciting for us.
Mother Nature’s always throwing those curve balls at us. No two years are ever the same, let alone two days. So we’ve got that to keep us on our toes, but I’m talking about things that we purposefully change up to keep it exciting and interesting in helping us grow along with our plants.
Giving new crop varieties a shot is one way to mix things up in the garden and keep it interesting.
Avoid Being Overly Ambitious
Taking on more than we can chew is a self-inflicted way to burn out. We do this a lot because when we’re starting our spring garden, oftentimes it’s a blank slate. We have that garden space with nothing in it, and we have either just seeds or seedlings. We know that they’re going to get bigger and we know what they’re going to ultimately look like because we’ve done it before. And yet we still don’t let ourselves take that into full consideration.
We can’t stand looking at vacant beds. So we find things to stick there and buy more or grow more, or we sow more than we have the capacity to manage. Then we do everything we can to see them through to the bitter end, and that can become exhausting.
If you’re gardening intensively, you’re working throughout the season to manage those plants, keep them looking good, dealing with the insect pasts, dealing with the disease pressure. You’re out there in the heat or the rain or the wind or whatever the elements are — and then because you’ve been successful and made it through the big challenges, now you have to harvest all those vegetables or flowers. It’s a big job to make sure you harvest everything in time.
Curtailing your ambition to be more in line with your actual lifestyle and time for hobbies will go a long way toward avoiding burnout.
Unrelenting Circumstances
When I refer to unrelenting circumstances, I’m mainly talking about the weather. Mother Nature throws curveballs at us, creating challenges.
One of the best realizations I ever made years ago was finally admitting that I was never going to have a perfect garden. That’s a huge waste of time — although I tried for a long time. Realizing everything would never be perfect brought huge freedom and took a lot of weight off my shoulders. Then as Mother Nature threw those next curve balls, I wasn’t trying to hit them out of the park. I was just trying to get on base.
The positive to unpredictable weather is that gardening is never boring. If every day were the same, that would get old. I wouldn’t be nearly the gardener that I am today if not for the challenges. Embrace those challenges, take them on as they come and do the best you can, but realize you’re never gonna get the final say. That’s liberating.”
The Forces Beyond Our Control
Climate change has meant that we can no longer rely on history as an indicator of what the future will hold. The weather patterns we have come to expect are broken. We must learn to garden adaptively, with an open mind, and anticipate.
It is exhausting when you’re getting weather events that you’ve never experienced before and just don’t quite know how to handle — and then you get another one and another one. It’s certainly felt that way this season for many gardeners. We’ve had to quickly learn how to adapt.
If it knocks you down, don’t let it keep you down. When you get up from that, you’re stronger than you ever were.
Avoid Doing What You Know Better Not To Do
Once we know what that we have planted as much as we’re going harvest to eat, preserve or donate — we should stop planting. Don’t feel the need to grow more than you need. Recognize you don’t have to grow things you don’t like to eat or like to grow. It feels good to be free of that burden and that perceived obligation. Just focus on growing the things that bring you joy.
Don’t plant more than you need and don’t grow the vegetables you don’t love to grow and eat. Shed feelings of obligation to grow more than you have the time and energy for.
Just Because It’s Spring, It Doesn’t Mean You Have to Sprint at the Crack of a Starting Gun
When spring approaches and we are gung-ho about a new gardening season, many of us make the mistake of hitting breakneck speed immediately. This can come in the form of starting seeds too early — so early that they outgrow our indoor growing environments before it is safe to transplant them outside. This leads to challenges before the season is even started.
Seedlings that were started too early can become leggy and weak, making them prone to diseases and pests. Our efforts to start plants indoors to give them a headstart can backfire on us when we rush into seed starting.
Transplanting outdoors at the first possible opportunity — as soon as the last frost of spring has passed — can likewise lead to headaches down the line. Plants started right at the beginning of the season will experience the pests and diseases that move in in May and June. Plants that were started from seed later in spring and transplanted outdoors later could bypass many of those pests and diseases.
Put Guardrails in Place
Putting guardrails or limits in place will go a long way to preventing future burnout.
Liz Ross put limits on herself by making a list of what she will buy before she ever touches a seed catalog. Can you imagine making a list of what you know you want to grow and sticking to that before you ever open a catalog? How much money could you save? And how much peace would you have in the garden if you stuck to that simple rule that you put in place for yourself?
Seeds have a limited life, and so we want to use them while they’re their freshest typically. So we plant them. And when we don’t and we have leftover seeds, we feel a little guilty. Save yourself that unnecessary work or that guilt by not ordering so many seeds in the first place.
Ask for Help
If you’re like me, you’re not good at asking for help. It’s hard to entrust our gardens to someone else’s care, and it’s easy to get caught up in doing it all.
In a healthy garden, the garden grows quickly and abundantly, and it’s hard not to become overwhelmed in that environment, which of course can lead to burnout. So ask for help. There are so many people out there who would love an opportunity to spend time in a garden. And no, it doesn’t have to be their garden. They just want to get their hands in the soil, breathe fresh air, be around plants and people. And it can be any job in the garden — it can be weeding. But for you, who needs the help, it’s a game changer.
Take One Step Back so You Can Take Two Steps Forward
I want you to invest time in creating ways to simplify your time in the garden or make that time in the garden more pleasant. But it requires you to step back. And it’s okay if you’re going to miss a week or a month or even a season in the garden.
Step back, step away and really think through how you can make your gardening life easier. Make notes, contemplate, take a month off, or at the end of the season, make note of what worked, what didn’t and why. What would you change? What did you like? What didn’t you like? What do you want to avoid? What do you want to repeat? What needs fixing? What powerful questions to ask yourself so that you can come into the next season better equipped mentally and physically than you’ve ever been before?
Maybe you spent too much time watering. Well, think about how you can automate your irrigation. Maybe it was the weeds that were overwhelming. Did you add sufficient mulch in your garden beds to cut down on the weeds? That will make a huge difference. Did you search for a way to make your plants cooler as intense heat set in? Can you invest in shade cloth.? Or maybe combat insect pressure by investing in row cover to exclude pests.
Understand Your Limitations and Don’t Make Unhealthy Comparisons
Cynthia R, who is a third-generation gardener from zone 6b and a student in the Online Gardening Academy, reminds herself to understand her limitations and understand that there are healthy comparisons and unhealthy comparisons.
When we are trying to compare what we’re doing to someone else, that’s never going to work. Contentment is destroyed by comparison. Don’t compare yourself to your neighbors or the people you see on social media.
You can’t expect your garden to always be perfect. The plants will have pest and disease issues despite your best efforts, and that’s okay. You can’t compare your garden to what you see on social media, which doesn’t reflect gardening reality.
What’s the worst-case scenario if you take a break from gardening? There’s always next year or next season. And if something flops in the garden, you can pull it out. The stakes are so low in the big picture compared to the rest of the demands on our lives.
We have obligations to our family and friends and to our mental health and our physical health, and we need rest too. So don’t feel guilty for not doing everything.
I hope you enjoyed my take on gardening burnout. If you haven’t listened to the podcast yet, you can do so now by scrolling to the top of the page and clicking the Play icon in the green bar under the page title.
How do you avoid gardening burnout? Let us know in the comments below.
Links & Resources
Some product links in this guide are affiliate links. See full disclosure below.
Episode 033: Savvy Seed Catalog Shopping
Episode 065: Tips For Reducing Garden Overwhelm, with Margaret Roach
Episode 254: Overcoming Gardening Hurdles
joegardener Online Gardening Academy™: Popular courses on gardening fundamentals; managing pests, diseases & weeds; seed starting and more.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Organic Vegetable Gardening: My new premium online course. The course is designed to be a comprehensive guide to starting, growing, nurturing and harvesting your favorite vegetables, no matter what you love to eat, no matter where you live, no matter your level of gardening experience.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Master Seed Starting: Everything you need to know to start your own plants from seed — indoors and out.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Beginning Gardener Fundamentals: Essential principles to know to create a thriving garden.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Growing Epic Tomatoes: Learn how to grow epic tomatoes with Joe Lamp’l and Craig LeHoullier.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Master Pests, Diseases & Weeds: Learn the proactive steps to take to manage pests, diseases and weeds for a more successful garden with a lot less frustration. Just $47 for lifetime access!
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Perfect Soil Recipe Master Class: Learn how to create the perfect soil environment for thriving plants.
Earthbound Expeditions: Discover South Africa with Joe Lamp’l
Milorganite® – Our podcast episode sponsor and Brand Partner of joegardener.com
Soil3 – Our podcast episode sponsor and Brand Partner of joegardener.com – Enter code JOEGARDENER24 for $10 off
Heirloom Roses – Our podcast episode sponsor and Brand Partner – Enter code JOE20 at checkout for 20% off all roses until 12/31/24.
Pure Protect Deer Repellent by Heirloom Roses – Our podcast episode sponsor and Brand Partner of joegardener.com
Farmers Defense – Our podcast episode sponsor and Brand Partner of joegardener.com
Disclosure: Some product links in this guide are affiliate links, which means we get a commission if you purchase. However, none of the prices of these resources have been increased to compensate us, and compensation is not an influencing factor on their inclusion here. The selection of all items featured in this post and podcast was based solely on merit and in no way influenced by any affiliate or financial incentive, or contractual relationship. At the time of this writing, Joe Lamp’l has professional relationships with the following companies who may have products included in this post and podcast: Corona Tools, Milorganite, Soil3, Greenhouse Megastore, Territorial Seed Company, Earth’s Ally, Proven Winners ColorChoice, Farmer’s Defense, Heirloom Roses and Dramm. These companies are either Brand Partners of joegardener.com and/or advertise on our website. However, we receive no additional compensation from the sales or promotion of their product through this guide. The inclusion of any products mentioned within this post is entirely independent and exclusive of any relationship.
