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GAUGE: Collect valuable data P-TO-THE-MINUTE data about rainfall, temperature, wind speed and soil conditions is a real help to gardeners, which is why a lot of us tend to acquire all sorts of meters and monitors.
It’s not just about being control freaks. Recording the weather in your garden helps you plan for the long term and with insider information about soil acidity and micro climate you can tailor planting schemes to suit.
If you have an eye on your electricity bills, however, the good news is that some of the best solutions are cheap and low-tech. Rainfall determines whether you need to water plants or not and rather than rely on guesswork, you can see exactly how much has fallen with a ready-calibrated funnel-shaped rain-gauge that costs only a couple of pounds.
Read it daily then tip out the water and start again to avoid results being spoilt by evaporation.
A max-min thermometer records the highest and lowest ambient temperatures. It’s a great gadget for greenhouse owners who like to check overnight lows and daytime highs so they can adjust their ventilation and watering. It’s also handy in a conservatory or by your veg patch since it helps you decide when it’s safe to plant frost-tender crops, move patio plants outside or cover tomatoes or late crops at night as autumn draws in. S AN alternative, a wireless thermometer (which works from batteries) does the same job and saves the results to play back when you request.
It also tracks temperatures at a remote sensor which can be up to 25 metres away, so you can keep tabs on what’s happening at two different locations.
Real enthusiasts might like to kit themselves out with a full electronic weather station which feeds results to a single central unit placed indoors. I have one and it has become as essential as my watch or alarm clock but they aren’t cheap.
If you don’t mind going outside to look, for under a tenner you can install a gadget on a post that lets you record wind speed and direction and also has a chart for calculating the wind-chill factor.
A basic thermometer is invaluable for general use but you’ll also find a long, straight soil thermometer ideal for discovering when garden soil reaches 45F for sowing seeds in spring.
There’s also a shorter version available which is sold as a propagating thermometer.
Perhaps most valuable is a soil-testing kit. It is something we should all use when we move to a new house to help discover how acid or alkaline our ground is.
It’s also worth retesting annually since pH can change. You can get simple one-off kits but regular users prefer a meter, which looks like a mobile phone with a rod sticking out of the base.
For those who always wanted a chemistry set, there’s a complete soil-test kit, with bottles of chemicals for testing pH plus all the main nutrients.
TIME TO GO A LITTLE POTTY ON YOUR PATIO