Of the several repetitive garden chores I was responsible for as a teenager – the never-ending Sisyphean tasks I swore I would not do when I grew up – three in particular irritated me: mowing grass, hoeing garden rows and schlepping potted plants indoors and out.

I’ve dropped two: mowing and hoeing. I lost the lawn and I garden in small, thickly-planted raised beds instead of row-cropping, and I mulch to keep weeds at bay.

Oh, how I resented the backbreaking chore of dragging my mother’s cherished Bird of Paradise outside each Spring. The redwood planter was too much for her. It had a little wheeled platform, which made getting it to the door easier, but I still had to lift the thing through the door and up and down the porch steps.

These days, I leave a few large indoor-tolerant plants – including my prize dracaena – inside year-round. But I still find myself having to haul in and out a couple dozen plants, including a handful of big ’uns for which I don’t have a “Little Felder” to help with. I put them out last month to get some fresh air and a good soaking and dusting with the hose. As southern weather would have it, they had to be brought back in during our late Blackberry Winter cold snap.

Today, they are back out again for the duration of our warm seasons and they have been groomed of fading old leaves and dead stems. I’ve given them a bit of fresh potting soil where needed and a season-long dose of slow-release potted plant fertilizer, which feeds a little every time I water. I also covered the soil with mulch to keep the sun from drying them out so quickly.

The weeping fig, hibiscus and bougainvillea vine are very messy indoors, but over the years I learned an easy way to keep them from getting overgrown while reducing the incredible leaf litter they shed every time the plants get moved. It’s not pretty, but I bite the bullet and prune them to look like leggy, bare hat racks before bringing them in, which both removes the leaves before they can shed and also stimulates strong new growth that is better adapted to indoors. The visual anguish of having naked plants in pots for two or three weeks is offset by the benefits, and they quickly sprout out better than ever. Without the mess.

By the way, I also prune those plants when setting them back out, because the winter growth is usually leggy and weak; the new growth only takes a couple of weeks, and it is stronger and better blooming.

The other main chore I most resented as a kid was our “mow what grows” flower lawn with clover and dandelions. Couldn’t go swimming ’til the grass got cut, and back then we just had a push mower. Ugh.

So it’s no wonder that the grown-up me, in spite of being a trained lawn consultant, doesn’t have a lawn at all; luckily, I garden on a small city lot where it is easy to have shrub and flower beds and scattered small decks and flagstone areas connected with walks. Had I a larger landscape, I would deliberately have two kinds of lawn: a small, well-maintained throw-rug-size area like a golf course putting green that can easily be mowed, edged, watered, fertilized and weeded, set amid a larger flowery “fairway” that only gets mowed as needed, and that’s all. I see this a lot in England, where the contrast looks great while reducing the lawn maintenance chores.

Not all childhood chores are grown-up must-dos; some, either wisely or lazily, I learned to garden without.

Felder Rushing is a Mississippi author, columnist and host of the “Gestalt Gardener” on MPB Think Radio. Email gardening questions to [email protected].