Going somewhere hot? Then make sure things don’t
Anxious about leaving your plants behind this summer? Don’t worry – you’re in safe hands. Agnes Stevenson explains how to ensure a stress-free holiday overheat at home
Holiday season is almost here and so it’s time to flex my vacation smarts. I’m an expert at travelling the world with nothing more than a handbag yet still having an outfit for every occasion and I’ve got degree-level skills at getting to the head of an airport queue in a matter of minutes.
But probably my biggest talent lies in setting up the garden to look after itself in my absence. This is something I’ve refined over many years, when a combination of work and family commitments has meant that I’ve had to leave the garden to care for itself for up to seven weeks at a time at the height of the growing season.
This year I won’t be absent for anything like that length of time but I’ll still be pulling out all the stops to make sure that things keep ticking over nicely and the secret to getting this right is to start well in advance and not leave preparations until the night before you leave.
The first step is to round up everything growing in pots and plunge as many of them as you can into gaps in the borders, then give them a thorough watering and pile a thick mulch of grass clippings around the roots to keep them damp.
Anything that doesn’t go into the ground should be placed in the shadiest corner and if you have any areas of new plantings, then a timer unit, a hose pipe and a sprinkler attachment will keep them watered regularly.
Sweet peas and bedding plants should be stripped of all their flowers and buds to prevent them from running to seed and to promote the production of new flowers in time for your return and remember to remove every single courgette, however small, otherwise you will return to a crop of marrows. If you are lucky, a few well-timed showers will stop anything from going
short of water but that’s not much use in the greenhouse. My recipe here is to open all vents to prevent overheating and to use a couple of 90 litre black plastic bins, filled with water into which I’ve added some plant food, and then using strips of capillary matting to keep tomatoes, chillies and hothouse plants watered in my absence.
You can buy expensive irrigation systems that will do this for you but this low-cost method works just as well and the more often you set it up the better you get at refining how much water every plant actually gets. A variation of this method also works for hanging baskets, which can’t last more than a day without attention.
Remove them from their brackets, push strips of capillary matting through the bottom of the baskets, and then sit these on tops of water-filled buckets. The water will flow continually up the matting and into the roots, keeping the plants happy until you get back, bronzed and relaxed, and ready to hang them back in position again.