Drought and shade
There are solutions for all weather challenges, says Peter
IT is to be hoped that by the time you read this, we will have had a good rainfall. When writing, the lawn was brown, and even trees were wilting, and keeping vegetables growing meant hours on a hose. I did pick a really good crop of garden peas from the quarter-pallet size wooden container, just in time to sow another late crop of Garden Pea ‘Terrain’. This cultivar resists mildew disease and has proved an excellent autumn cropping introduction.
A common question is on plants for shade, where both lack of light and drought are a challenge. There are several such patches in my garden, and growing in containers is often a practical answer.
If you have the north side of a Leylandii hedge that you want to make more interesting, you should try a run of growbags along the base. Plant with shade-loving impatiens and begonias, regularly watered, and they will give a carpet of colour into the autumn. Setting up an automatic irrigation system with drip nozzles will give excellent results – just make drainage holes in the sides
of the bags, an inch or so (2½cm) up from the ground. Another approach is to stand plants in pots when the soil below is full of woody roots, which take all the moisture. In hot weather, such containers also need to be stood in saucers. Where the compost dries and shrinks from the side of the container, irrigation just runs down the gap and needs to be caught in a saucer so moisture can be taken up again by capillarity.
Some plants will survive drought and poor soils, with nasturtiums a perfect example, although they do need good light. There was a big trial of them last summer, and their major drawbacks – cabbage white butterfly caterpillars and black fly – were controlled effectively by biological control using Dragonfli products, which employ tiny parasitic wasps to attack cabbage white eggs ( dragonfli.co.uk).
“Put plants in pots when soil is full of woody roots”