4 minute read
Full Monty: the trouble with rainwater
We November
T h e F u l l M o n t y Recent rains may have filled our water butts, but it’s not enough – it’s time to rethink how we garden given pressures on our water supply, says Monty
It is raining here, raining hard. The water
butts are overflowing and the puddles straddling half the garden paths. The ground is skiddy with mud. Three months ago, when we were desperate for water, this would have been an idyllic picture but now it is very wet and not in a good way. The other day, I was reading a politician of some hue saying that he didn’t know what all the climate change fuss was about – that we have just as much rainfall now as we had 100 years ago, and people were making a fuss back then. It demeans everyone to have to take this sort of remark seriously but given that politicians are in positions of power, if not responsibility, let me highlight a few things – not least because we gardeners feel this so acutely.
The first is that there are a lot more people in the UK now than there were 100 years ago – about 25 million, or an increase of over 50 per cent. The second thing is that a disastrous amount of trapped and distributed rainwater – to the tune of just under three billion litres every single day – leaks in England and Wales before it can be used. But much more significant than
even this is that we are increasingly getting our water at the wrong time. If our springs and summers are becoming drier, it does not matter how much rain you have in winter if you cannot store it. Then if, as last winter, we have a dry winter too, we are in real trouble.
This is obviously a national problem that involves more reservoirs, more maintenance of pipework and better management of how we use our water. However, it also applies on a micro level in each and every garden. Traditionally garden water butts have served two primary purposes. The first is to provide a source of water for filling watering cans and the second is to provide a source of rainwater for plants such as citrus or ericaceous plants that suffer from the lime that is often very prevalent in tap water. But very few gardens use water butts as their primary source of water, especially those with space for a border or two and perhaps some vegetables. I suspect that most people’s water butts, such as they may be, are now overflowing. However this is not just down to the large quantity of rain that has fallen in the past couple of days but also the limited quantity of water that each container will hold. The whole water-saving model that has been the norm in gardens for the past 100 years or more no longer works.
We do not actually have water butts here at Longmeadow as such, but use cattle troughs, which have the great advantage of being slim and open so you can fill cans by dipping – which is 10 times quicker than filling them from a tap. At present we have nine, all catching water from the greenhouses. This is a lot of water catchment but even this gives us barely enough water to irrigate all our containers for a normal week or about three very hot days. Then, when we need the water most, they do not refill until it rains when we only need to water inside the greenhouses. Clearly, we need to think beyond this. If only we could store more of this winter rain, then it would make a significant difference.
On the Greek island of Hydra, where I have been helping create a garden over the past six or seven years, every household has a large cistern beneath the back yard. Historically this was to collect rainwater in winter, which was then used for washing, cooking, watering herbs and even drinking in the long, very dry, very hot summer months. Increasingly I am thinking that this is the kind of scale of water collection that we need on a domestic level if we are to keep our gardens sufficiently watered. When we came to Longmeadow, we put in a septic tank under what is now the Spring Garden. If I was to start again, while the digger was at work, I would also put in an equally big water tank underground and feed the house gutters into it.
I realise that this is only one side of the equation. Growing plants that need less water has to be the other. Reducing the demand for water is just as effective as increasing the supply. We must rethink our whole concept of what is a viable British summer garden. But, as I watch the rain lash the windows and hear it gurgle and swirl around the drains, I wish I could hang on to some of it to draw upon next summer.
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