I'm terribly grateful that I decided not to grow any vegetables or anything from seed this year. It wasn't that I had any prescient foresight of how bad the drought was going to be, just that as I looked at the mess the garden was in after two hard winters I thought that something was going to have to give, while I caught up with myself, and veg and seedlings are both time-consuming. It's the first time for over twenty years that I haven't had pots and trays of new young plants on the go. I love raising plants from seed, and I'd even put in a modest order to Chiltern Seeds, but as my normal seed sowing date in the second week of February slipped by and it got to March, I realised that there simply wasn't going to be time this year. At that point I made the policy decision to give the veg a miss too. I like homegrown vegetables, especially the things you can't easily buy like small absolutely fresh broad beans, and the Systems Administrator will miss not having a large pile of beetroot to pickle, but the sowing and weeding and watering do take ages. Surrounded by dead shrubs to remove and blank stretches of borders, rapidly filling up with weeds, I thought that reclaiming the ornamental planting was more urgent. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, watering the veg would have been a nightmare, and the seedlings would probably have cooked at some point in the greenhouse despite my best efforts with shading paint.
Watering is becoming the all-consuming task, and I plan each day's work on the basis of what needs watering most badly and positioning myself in that part of the garden. Today I largely dispensed with actual gardening, and spent the time mostly watering, standing over a needy plant, hose in hand, counting to sixty, then on to the next one. It is no longer a question of whether the cherry tree will drop its fruit (although, amazingly, they are still on the branches), but which plants look as though they are actually going to die without water. The Zelkova carpinifolia has got dieback on the south facing side (which could of course be Dutch Elm Disease, but I think is drought, as it isn't displaying the characteristic shepherd's crook curling at the twig tips). I ran the hose for twenty minutes on a Malus floribunda, which I would normally never consider watering, but its leaves, small, incurved and the wrong shade of green, were signalling acute distress.
We have arrived at an efficient system of hoses over the years. The outside tap leads to a four-way distributor, each outlet with its own valve which can be open or shut. One hose, with spray nozzle permanently attached, leads down to the conservatory, where it lives coiled in a largish flower pot when not in use. The hose is just long enough to reach everything in pots in the back garden, as well as into the conservatory. A second hose, again with permanent spray attachment, is long enough to reach to the extremities of both the front and back gardens, and is kept flaked down by the dustbins when not in use. (Since at the moment it is in almost constant use it is currently in the front garden by the chicken house). A third hose leads to a second tap up by the vegetables, where there is another long hose that will reach to all the fruit, the veg patch, and up the meadow by the wood. We've got spare lengths of hose so this can be extended if needs be to reach to the very far end of the meadow. The fourth hose is short, and is used to fill cans at the tap. There used to be a fifth hose that was led permanently to my greenhouse, but that split where it used to get run over, and at the moment I'm using the all-purpose long hose. I might replace it, on the other hand it was a bore with five hoses and four spaces to plug them in, always having to keep switching them over.
Labelling the individual hoses is the least satisfactory part. I wrote descriptions on plastic plant labels and tied them to the hoses with wire, but they kept sliding down out of sight and the labels broke. Recently I thought I was being very efficient tying tape round them, and writing on the tape with marker pen, but the pen smeared and wore off. Now each is permanently plumbed in I simply remember which location feeds which hose.
We did find ourselves forgetting to turn the outside tap off after use, which could be wasteful of water if a fitting came loose, so I made a token, consisting of a short length of hose on wire, designed to be hung from the front door handle when the tap is in use. The theory is that we can't go back into the house without being reminded that the tap is still on. I took the idea from the railway safety system for ensuring that only one train was on a given length of track, and was rather pleased with it. It is a good system, as long as we bother to use the token.
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