Today in my garden monarch butterflies drift between abelia blossoms and hummingbirds zip through the borders in search of salvia flowers full of nectar. A summer drought has been going on for several weeks now, and although we’ve had a smattering of rainfall here and there, a few minutes of rain isn’t ever enough to provide a good drink for my garden plants.
This month I’ll spend some mornings dragging hoses around, watering slowly and gently with a couple of old-fashioned water sprinklers. While I do water our lawn with an irrigation system, I’ve found it best to hand water containers and flower beds so that when I’m watering grass two or three times a week in the worst of our hot weather, the flowers and shrubs don’t get overwatered.
Rainfall is never a topic of conversation among gardeners until mother nature turns off the water spigot for a few weeks and suddenly things can look pretty dire, especially if you have a garden full of summer-blooming plants at their peak. I’ve noticed among my gardening friends there is a bit of a debate about how much and when one should water. Every parcel of land is different. Some dry out quickly, while others tend to stay waterlogged for days after a rain, so the question is how do you know when to water and when to leave things alone?
When temperatures are in the nineties, and your hydrangeas droop in the afternoon sun, it seems logical to reach for the water hose, but actually that not may be necessary. Sometimes the air is so hot that the plant is losing water from its leaves faster than the roots can replace it, which causes mid-day wilt. It doesn’t mean that there isn’t water available to the plant. If you think the soil should still have moisture in it because you’ve recently watered, it is wise to wait until morning to see if the plant has recovered. If it is still droopy in the morning, it’s time to water.
The absolutely best way to know if your plants need water is to take a hand trowel and dig down a few inches to see if there is moisture in the soil. Often when it rains in the South the soil is so dry that water runs off instead of soaking into the ground. Clay soil holds onto moisture well, but if it is very dry (which is typical in July and August), it may take time for it to rehydrate. This calls for slow watering, best done with the old-fashioned sprinkler I mentioned above. (Remember the ones that kids used to run through back in the 70s?)
I’m not a fan of the stand sprinklers that shoot water across the landscape. I want a gentle spray of water to hit the soil so that it has time to soak in rather than run off. For many years during weeks with no rainfall I would stand in front of my flower border with my water hose and think that I was doing a good job of watering, but in reality I was just watering the top layer of soil, which just isn’t enough this time of year.
It is better to water deeply one area at a time. Over a weekend you can get a lot of watering done this way, and while the sprinkler is doing its work you can get on to other things like weeding, or even better, reading a book with a glass of iced-tea in hand while your dog runs around chasing butterflies.
On the flip side of things, too much water is probably worse than too little water. You can likely revive a plant that has been underwatered if you are patient, but one that has been overwatered for weeks is less likely to recover.
In the vast majority of gardens, watering every day is not a good idea. Plant roots that sit in wet soil day after day will be starved of oxygen. Soil that is waterlogged contains none of the tiny air pockets that are needed for good root health. While there are plants that love swampy soil (lysimachia or creeping jenny comes to mind), the vast majority of plants that you and I want to grow, such as peonies, hydrangeas, salvia, daisies, coneflowers, etc. will thrive in soil that is well-drained and neither too wet, nor too dry.
I’ve lost many more plants to wet soil than dry soil over the years, and there is nothing more heartbreaking than watching a plant or shrub slowly decline while the spring rain pours down, day after day, but sometimes it happens, and garden life goes on.
While this time of year is challenging for us in the dry South, as they say, this too shall pass. I’m looking forward to those long, golden fall days when I can putter all day without breaking a sweat. Until then I’m in the garden listening for afternoon thunder, pulling weeds, and marvelling at the enormous zuchini plant in my gravel garden that keeps pumping out squashes faster than I can cook them. Zuchini bread anyone?
The day after I wrote this post the skies opened and it began to rain, as if to prove me wrong about the dry weather in July. Thankfully, the forecast shows the promise of more rain during the next week, along with slightly cooler temperatures.