The watering season in the garden has begun in earnest. For weeks now irrigation rigs have been swooshing away in the surrounding fields, sending slowly rotating arcs of water out over the potatoes and wheat. The garden has hung on, everything other than the newly planted left to its own devices and coping. It helped that we had a wet winter, so the ground went into summer loaded with moisture. Plus I aim to grow things that can cope with the local conditions, sandy soil through half the garden, and low rainfall. And unlike the farmers I am not trying to get a commercial yield.
I was shocked on Thursday, just as I was climbing into the car to go out, to spot a highly distressed and dessicated Prunus in the long bed. I must admit, I'd forgotten all about it in recent days and hadn't watered it, but it has been watered since planting and until last week was doing fine. Suddenly, with higher temperatures, sun, and no meaningful rainfall, conditions have tipped over into gardening drought, at least for the sandy beds in the front garden. I poured a can of water on the Prunus before going out, and another the next day, and it may pull round, or it may not. Maybe I should cut memory out of the process entirely when it comes to watering newly planted things, keep a list , and note the date when I water each plant on it, like those cleaning check lists on supermarket loos.
This morning, as I searched for places to plant the hyacinths from this year's pots in the ground, I looked carefully at the condition of the long border. In the tell-tale worst areas of soil, where even species praised for their drought tolerance in all my books on gravel and Mediterranean gardening have been known to remain stunted and shrivelled, the remaining tough survivors and the volunteers like Verbascum nigrum were beginning to flag. There's no rain to speak of forecast for this week, and experience teaches that it is time to start watering. The first plants to show distress are always those in the worst soil, and the newly planted, but as the week goes on they will be joined by anything that went in last year and doesn't yet have a fully mature root system, and those species that are not ultra drought resistant. The front garden generally goes first, because it is on the lightest soil, then the back garden follows.
Today was the turn of the dahlia bed. I fenced the chickens off the dahlias in good time this year, unlike last, but was slow to act against slugs and snails. The poor dahlias spent a week or two having every attempt at making leaves eaten back to stumps, before I realised that they really ought to be showing some growth that far into May, risk of late frosts notwithstanding. I put down slug pellets, reluctantly but it was that or no dahlias, and they finally began to make progress, but I thought that after such a dodgy start to the season they could do with some help. Their bed has received plenty of organic material over the years, but has sharp drainage, which allows me over-winter them successfully in the ground, but means they do need the odd soaking in summer.
After the dahlias it was the turn of the Malus 'Red Sentinel'. I have a group of three growing in gravel and within competing root distance of the boundary hedge, while two are on the edge of one of the veins of really spectacularly poor soil. They are getting fish, blood and bone as well as water, and looking at them I think I had better try and water them weekly between now and the end of summer. They have made very little extension growth this year, which tells me that they are not happy trees.
Tomorrow I'll start on the long bed. We don't have an overhead sprayer. Instead I put the hose with its normal spray gun switched on, resting on the ground so that it sprays water over the root area of the plant I want to water, and get on with weeding or trimming nearby for a few minutes until that plant or little group of plants has had a good soaking. Then I move the hose and continue weeding and pruning. I think about where I need to use water, and the water goes straight on to the ground instead of being sprinkled over the foliage or blown out of the bed entirely. I experimented with leaky hose, a long time ago, but couldn't get it to work for me. The water doesn't move that far sideways from the hose, so if you have a dense matrix of planting rather than a limited number of key shrubs each covering a lot of space, you need multiple runs of hose to cover the whole bed. And it always showed, and I had to water an entire area, not focus water on the plants that most needed it.
No comments:
Post a Comment