| Bye bye, water... |
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| Written by Penny Kitchen, 2006 | |
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How has your garden fared this summer? A year ago I moved to a part of Surrey that features clay soil you could throw pots with, and as I write – in June – my flowerbeds are cracking like a parched riverbed in the Outback. It used to happen to my window boxes when I lived in the Middle East – but in England?It is the first time in 20 years that I’ve had enough space to plant vegetables, but with the rock-hard earth and the hosepipe ban, I have been forced to rethink the whole business of gardening. Magazines and newspapers, Chelsea and Hampton Court Flower Shows, not to mention accompanying messages from the water company, have all urged us to install water butts at every down-pipe. But have you ever tried to water a veg patch with the contents of a water butt? It only takes one watering and the butt is half-empty, two and you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel. Some of the advice raining down on us has been a little hard to take: why would I want to plant ivy, for instance? I loathe ivy and paid a lot of money to have it scraped off my house. I’m not going to welcome it back just because it can survive a drought! The other thing that pundits have glossed over is the cost of some of these measures, which is why I love the suggestions to be found in Gardening Without Water, which provides lots of cheap recycling ideas. My second water butt cost £34 including the diverter for the downpipe through a special offer by our water company, but add that to the cost of rotavating my future vegetable patch (a necessity since I couldn’t even get a fork into the cement-hard ground) and suddenly every home-grown courgette and lettuce leaf has become a luxury item. Not so pottySome of the advice has been successful and bears repeating, especially if we are to experience another (continuing) drought as forecasters predict. I particularly appreciated anything that involved me in less effort, such as:
I love the splash of colour provided by patio pots, but I reduced their number by 50 per cent and it has certainly saved me time and water. My only hanging basket now is filled with Tumbling Tom tomatoes. I emptied the compost from at least 15 big pots into the vegetable patch to help break up the clay and threw the old plants on the compost heap. Geraniums survive drought quite well, but I abandoned the petunias, begonias and Busy Lizzies and planted phormiums and cordylines with their colourful strap-like leaves to create a Mediterranean feel. I planted a variety of herbs in one big pot, using an expanding, sponge-like ‘water saver’ under the compost. In assorted other big containers I planted strawberries, courgettes, squashes and peppers where my frugal watering got straight to where it was needed. To stop the water from evaporating quickly, I first lined the terracotta pots and wooden tubs with plastic (strong black bin bags or empty compost bags do the trick). What pots remained I grouped in a shady spot on the deck rather than in full sun and that, too, greatly reduced the need for such frequent watering. Hardy annuals, recommended by Mr Fothergill Seeds, are the ones to go for if you still want to have colour in your beds. Once you have sprinkled seeds of godetia, clarkia, nigella, candytuft, cornflower and calendula directly into their flowering positions in May, you can sit back and wait for the flowers, rain or no rain. Poppies, tagetes, gazania, marguerites, cosmos and coreopsis are others. A good choiceWhen we moved to our new home in July 2005 we were bowled over by the sunny south-facing garden full of lavender. We ate out to the accompaniment of hundreds of buzzing bees. We found other drought-resistant shrubs in our garden that thrive in sunny dry conditions – coincidentally with mauve flowers that bees adore: ceanothus or California lilac, buddleia, rosemary and solanum crispum, which I knew as Chilean potato vine.When water is in short supply, you have to make sure you put it to best use and do everything in your power to stop it from evaporating. Grass cuttings tend to go slimy in a compost heap but do a power of good as a mulch around water-guzzling vegetables such as runner beans, courgettes and cucumbers. Of course, had I known they were ‘water-guzzling’ before I planted my seeds, my veg patch might have looked a little different! There are many varieties of vegetable that will do well when water is not freely available. Some of these include French beans, beetroot, carrots, sweetcorn, asparagus, rhubarb and pumpkin. Berry fruits, such as black, red and white currants, also do well in dry conditions, as do fruit trees like figs and mulberries. Sometimes solutions can be found for two problems at once, and without costing a penny. My clay soil desperately needed organic matter to break it up and retain moisture, but my fledgling compost heap hadn’t had time to ‘mature’. The answer came in the shape of a friend with three horses and an increasingly unmanageable manure pile. With so few farms remaining in the South East, disposal of horse manure has become somewhat of a problem for horse owners who are usually glad to let you help yourself. This autumn, why not approach your local stables to arrange to take some off their hands so that it is well rotted down for spring? Meanwhile, I’m off to do a rain dance over by the runner beans... Sources of good adviceEverything you need to know is on the Royal Horticultural Society website (www.rhs.org.uk). A book that was published in 1999 but has certainly come into its own this year is Charlotte Green’s Gardening Without Water, published by Search Press and the Henry Doubleday Research Association, price £8.95. Woman’s World readers can get this book at a special price of £6.95 post free in the UK, by calling Search Press on tel: 01892 510 850 and quoting “Woman’s World August 06”.Londoners use more water per capita than the rest of the country, so the Mayor’s office, in conjunction with Thames Water, has created a useful website (www.london.gov.uk/sunshinegarden) to help ‘re-educate’ people to use less water on their gardens. Designed to resemble a typical London back garden, and featuring a range of drought-tolerant plants and other water-saving and eco-friendly ideas, the Mayor’s Sunshine Garden at Hampton Court Flower Show demonstrated that you can have a beautiful garden while saving water. It featured a compost bin, chamomile lawn, a wormery, water butts, a living roof, an insect hotel, Mediterranean plants and drought-tolerant vegetables. The garden was created entirely from recycled or sustainable materials, with all sizes of plot in mind. Take inspiration from Hyde HallRHS Garden Hyde Hall is located near Chelmsford, Essex, in one of the driest areas of the British Isles, with an average annual rainfall of just 600mm (24in). Hyde Hall aims to develop and maintain a garden of beauty and diversity while also demonstrating sustainable horticultural techniques that are appropriate for the region and low rainfall areas in general.The Dry Garden, supported by Essex and Suffolk Water, has been designed and planted to demonstrate how a garden can be created without the need for artificial irrigation. The garden was constructed on a sloping site of approximately 1,600sqm using large boulders and stone mulch to give the impression of a natural rocky outcrop, similar to the environment in which many of the plants would occur in nature. Over 4,000 plants representing 730 different species and cultivars from five continents have been used in the Dry Garden. Good drainage is essential for drought-tolerant plants and so gritty topsoil has been used, mounded up into bunds over rubble-filled subsoil. The garden’s south-facing aspect means that the plants get plenty of sun, and individual rocks help to create microclimates for more tender plants. RHS Garden Hyde Hall is at Rettendon, Chelmsford Essex, tel: 01245 400256, www.rhs.org.uk |
