Rain’s no pain for our thirsty gardens
IT’Snot often I get excited about rainfall, but recent showers have done the trick. Even on our heavy soil, which holds on to moisture like a sponge, things were looking bad before the rains came. And friends who garden on sandy soil were driven to distraction by the constant watering required to prevent their plants from succumbing to the drought.
This has been a year of weather extremes. The surprise is not that some plants have died but that any have survived the rollercoaster of conditions. Yet some things are doing surprisingly well. Apple trees loved the cold winter temperatures and have responded by producing bumper crops while lavender, always a suspect choice in the wetter parts of Scotland, has relished the heat.
As salads have run to seed, strawberries have become increasingly sweet and slugs and snails have been stopped dead in their tracks by the sun.
My pots and containers, which I’ve irrigated heavily through the dry spell, have turned into mini jungles of foliage and flowers and, thanks to the fact it has more moss than grass, our lawn has remained pleasantly green. By my reckoning this is our best summer since 1976 and while the high temperatures may have their drawbacks, I’ve only just finished complaining about the cold spell so I’m determined not to gripe my way through the hot months. I’ve come to recognise the importance of mulch. It’s what protected many of my plants during the winter and it’s what’s helped others to survive the drought. Digging about under a thick layer on even the hottest day I could still find moisture in the soil, proving this magic ingredient has once again been doing its job of smoothing out the spikes in the weather chart.
My mulch consists mostly of last autumn’s leaves. We had such an abundance of these that after we’d filled countless bags to make leaf mould, the only option left was to rake them into the borders, where they’ve also helped to suppress the weeds.
Next time round I’d shred the leaves first – you can do this by running the lawnmower over them – to make a finer mulch as not only would this look more attractive, it might also help to prevent it from being blown around the garden on windy days.
In theory however it doesn’t matter what kind of mulch you use – compost, gravel, grass clippings – they can all help to hold moisture in the soil during dry spells. And in the absence of any of these, then hoeing the surface will also do the trick if repeated regularly.
Most flagging stems will right themselves once they’ve had a drink, but the effect of the rain on some other flowers has been to flatten them into the ground. It’s now that you discover if your attempts at staking have been adequate or whether you should have spent more time making cats’ cradles out of twine and twigs.