Water Water Everywhere – But Mostly In The Tap. Looking After Your Garden In The Heat

Yes. Wimbledon fortnight is here to fill in the gaps between huge football teams being knocked out of the World cup by minnows, and the strawberries and cream brigade are out in force in their Panamas, club ties and cool silks, sipping Pimms, wafting programmes in front of their faces and wondering what that curious grunting noise is that they can hear coming from all the lady tennis players.

And the courts look amazing. Lush, green, crisply striped and tightly mowed, just right for tennis and two tantalising weeks of excitement, controversy and cries of ‘Come on Andy’.

But how is your lawn looking? In fact, how is the garden looking in general? I only ask because if it is anything like mine it is not looking like the courts at Wimbledon and more like the courts at Roland Garros. Ok. Maybe an overstatement. Not exactly sandy but decidedly on the brown end of the spectrum.

Basically, we’ve not had enough rain. The sunshine is great, the temperature is great but we need some of the wet stuff and we need it soon.  As the famous song ‘Camelot’ from the musical of the same name tells us, the rain should only fall after the sun goes down. Well, that would be ideal of course, but I’d take a good four-hour soaking at midday right now.

So do you water? When? How? How much? Well here, short, sweet and hopefully, useful, are a few tips on looking after your lawn and your garden in the heat of the summer.

Don’t mow your lawn too close during very hot spells. Let it grow a little longer and when you do cut, raise the height of cut and mulch the clippings back into

the lawn if you can. Not all mowers allow you to mulch, but this one, the Racing 5073T 4-in-1 Hi-Wheel Self-Propelled Lawnmower on sale at MowDirect at the amazing price of £249 allows that, plus rear collection and side discharge.

‘Very impressed with the mower… Excellent build quality.’, ‘a great piece of kit would definitely buy one again.’

The clippings, if kept small, will help reduce the speed of evaporation of moisture in your lawn. Your lawn, if it has browned, will recover as soon as it does rain.

If you are going to water the lawn, and the ground has become hard, you could try aerating it first. You can use a simple, efficient, affordable aerator like the Al-Ko Comfort 38E Combi-Care Electric Aerator / Scarifier shown here.

‘Excellent product’, ‘A well-built machine that performs well. It is as good at the job as more expensive petrol driven machines I have hired previously.’

Alternatively, you could also go over the ground with a garden fork, creating holes at regular intervals which will help the water penetrate the ground more effectively and avoid water waste.

Get rid of weeds in any part of the garden. They are using up water as well, so removing them saves what there is for the plants you want to flourish.

Be economical with your watering. There is, as yet, no hose-pipe ban but if we are going to water the garden we do need to be responsible with our irrigation. especially watering the lawn, if you are going to do it, should be done in the early part of the day, early morning preferably or early evening and even night-time, so the water doesn’t evaporate, reducing waste and making sure every drop goes into the lawn.

Sprinklers can be wasteful so, again, if you have a programmable sprinkler, so you can set times, program your watering times for early in the day or much later in the evening.

Don’t water the leaves of your crops. A great example of what can happen if you do this in hot weather is my neighbour’s small crop of spinach. they let their daughter water it while they were away and the poor young woman had no idea and drenched the leaves. In the heat and sunshine we’ve had recently this means the water was heated by the midday sun and, basically, cooked. With no cream or nutmeg or anything. water the ground around your crops. in general, it is better to soak the base and the soil around it so the water goes to the roots, don’t cover the leaves in water in the sunshine and all should be well.

Anything newly planted should take priority. New plants are very vulnerable indeed and need lots of water so they should be watered first, as above.

And that’s it. Short and sweet as I mentioned but these tips should help, at least, in hot and rainless weather. knowing my luck it will rain on the very day when this blog gets published…but then we’d all be happy about that, wouldn’t we?  For more useful tips on gardening and garden machinery, do visit our knowledge base MowHow.    Enjoy Your garden.    Drew Hardy.

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