The Five Minute Garden

Breaking the work needed to keep a garden in perfect shape into daily five-minute chunks, this approach can yield amazing results.

Laetitia Maklouf is a garden writer and busy mother of three who has realized that the secret of gardening without becoming overwhelmed is to do something small every day. This book is packed with five-minute things over the gardening year which you can pick and choose at random when you have five minutes to spare. These little bursts of activity are set beneath different headings: "Spruce", "Chop", "Nurture", "Fuss", and "Project". The author writes: "I tend do one thing from each heading over the course of the week, but everyone is different, and the important thing is just to begin--just pick one thing at random from the relevant month in this book, and go out and start on that, because at some point in the very near future, you'll look behind you and realize how very far you have come."

Laetitia Maklouf is a writer and blogger. She is a columnist for the Sunday Times and has written two gardening books. She runs The Five Minute Gardener blog and newsletter--a chatty and fun diary of the tasks busy people can squeeze into five minutes to keep their garden in top shape year round.