GARDENS
The Garden Enclosure Jottings
I
t never rains when you need it, and after a long dry spring (whatever happened to April showers?!) gardeners may once again be fearing the possibility of hosepipe restrictions this year. So what can you do? Well…you could take up rain dancing as a second hobby – it keeps you fit and relieves stress – or you could become just a little more wateraware and carry on gardening! Water is essential to plants, so it’s important to ensure that what little there is available stays where it’s needed and not lost through evaporation. Home-made compost or well-rotted manure adds structure to soil and helps hold moisture around the root zone, so dig in as much as you can when preparing new borders or clearing through old, then give your beds a treat with a nice thick layer of decorative mulch.
Almost any material can be used, including bark, straw, cobblestones or ornamental gravels, and these are best applied when the soil is wet so that dampness is locked in. Mulches applied thickly have the added benefit of suppressing most weeds, or try using a porous weed fabric over new beds and cover it with a thinner mulch to make bagged materials go further. Sacrificing your green lawn for a brown one may become an annual occurrence, but you can ease this transformation by not cutting grass too short and leaving the clippings on as a mini mulch. You could even reduce your lawn area and instead establish a low maintenance Mediterranean-style border or entire garden using drought-tolerant plants. Planting trees with a light canopy creates dappled shade and provides you with a place to sit or
somewhere to position pots full of colourful summer planting. When choosing containers, go for glazed types and larger sizes which will hold moisture longer than smaller ones, and arrange them in small groups to make watering with a can easier. Use a good quality compost and incorporate water-retaining crystals (preferably with a slow-release fertiliser mixed in), and then, like the borders, top off with a mulch to reduce evaporation and improve their appearance. Established garden plants can be virtually ignored unless they show signs of wilting, but you will have to water young plants, and having your own supply nearby will make the chore of lugging cans about much easier, so consider installing water butts near to high demand areas such as your veg plot. Try to do the watering in the evening, and to avoid surface rooting give plants a decent soaking every few days rather than a daily splash. There’s nothing quite like natural water, so if you fancy the rain dancing please go ahead, a regular overnight session throughout the summer would be great, thanks!
Cheers Ken,
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