Well, that was hot.
If this summer taught us anything, it is that growing flowers in Britain isn’t quite what it used to be. We had long stretches without meaningful rain, periods of extreme heat and hosepipe bans arriving at exactly the point when everything in the cutting patch decided it would quite like a drink.
When you have grown those flowers from seed, it feels particularly painful to watch them struggle. You sowed them, pricked them out, potted them on, protected them from slugs, planted them out and possibly had encouraging conversations with them. By July, you are invested.
The good news is that we don’t have to wait until the next heatwave to do something about it. In fact, the end of summer is probably the best time to start thinking about next year because we have months to prepare. As we decide where next year’s Flower Club seeds are going to grow, we can design our cutting patches to cope much better with periods of heat and drought from the beginning.
We don’t necessarily need different flowers. We need to get cleverer about how we grow the ones we already love.
Start by improving your soil
If I could do only one thing between now and next summer, I would work on the soil, because ultimately your soil is your biggest water-storage tank.
Adding organic matter improves the soil’s ability to hold water and make it available to plants, and autumn is a good time to start. Once this year’s annuals have finished, clear the bed and add a decent layer of well-rotted compost or other suitable organic matter.
You don’t have to dig your entire garden to Australia. You can spread organic matter over the surface and allow worms, weather and time to begin doing much of the work for you.
Next spring, once the soil is moist, add a layer of mulch. This reduces water loss from the surface as well as suppressing weeds. The timing matters, though. It is much more useful to mulch moist soil before a drought than to suddenly cover bone-dry ground in the middle of one.
Trying to solve a water-retention problem in July is considerably harder than creating soil that holds onto more water in the first place.
Plan your water at the same time as you plan your flowers
We spend quite a lot of time deciding where the cosmos will go, where the ammi will go and whether we have possibly planted far too many sweet peas again. What I suspect most of us don’t do is draw the watering system onto our cutting-patch plan. I think we should.
Look at where your water will come from and how it will get to the flowers. Where is the nearest outside tap? Where are your water butts? Could you add another? Is rain falling onto a shed, greenhouse, garage or summerhouse roof and then simply disappearing down a drain?
Most importantly, how will you get that stored water to the cutting patch? It is much better to work this out while planning the beds than to discover in June that your irrigation system consists entirely of carrying a watering can backwards and forwards 427 times.
Consider installing drip irrigation
This is probably the piece of equipment I would most seriously consider adding to a cutting patch.
Rather than spraying water over a large area, proper dripline contains small emitters that release water slowly along the row. This allows you to put water into the soil around the roots rather than watering paths, foliage and areas where nothing is growing.
One ready-made option worth looking at is the GARDENA Starter Set Planted Rows S. It contains 15 metres of dripline with drip heads at 30cm intervals and includes a pressure-reducing Master Unit. It is designed for rows of plants, flower beds and ornamental planting.
Have a look at the GARDENA Starter Set Planted Rows S here.
For a larger cutting patch, GARDENA also makes a 25-metre system using dripline with emitters every 30cm. Although marketed primarily for hedges and planted borders, the principle is the same: a longer run of dripline that can be laid on or below the soil surface.
Have a look at the GARDENA 25m Micro-Drip system here.
One advantage of buying a modular system is that it can change as your cutting patch changes. This is important because a cutting patch has a mysterious habit of being considerably larger in year three than it was in year one.
There is another reason drip irrigation is worth investigating. Some UK water companies currently allow qualifying drip or trickle irrigation systems to be used during a hosepipe ban, provided they meet particular conditions. These conditions vary, so having dripline does not automatically mean you can use it during a ban. Always check the current rules issued by your own water company.
Catch more rain while we have it
There is something slightly ridiculous about living in Britain, watching water fall out of the sky for months and then discovering in July that we haven’t got enough of it.
Before next summer, look at every roof in your garden as a potential water collector. The house is the obvious one, but sheds, greenhouses, garages and summerhouses can all potentially feed water butts. Existing water butts can also be linked together, or you might decide that a larger storage tank makes sense if you have a sizeable cutting patch.
And don’t worry if the rainwater has been sitting in your water butt for months. Stored rainwater is generally perfectly fine for watering established flowers, even if it looks a little murky or has developed some algae. Use it on the soil around the plants rather than worrying about it being crystal clear. The one thing to watch is your drip-irrigation system: if you’re feeding dripline from a water butt, fit a suitable filter so that algae, leaves and other debris don’t clog those tiny emitters.
You don’t need to turn your garden into a municipal reservoir. The point is simply to capture more of the water that is already falling on your property rather than trying to find it once the weather turns dry.
Try an olla
One of my favourite things I found while researching this article is an ancient irrigation method: the olla.
An olla is essentially an unglazed terracotta vessel buried in the soil and filled with water. Because unglazed terracotta is porous, moisture gradually moves through the clay and into the surrounding soil.
You can buy purpose-made ollas, but gardeners also make simple versions using ordinary unglazed terracotta flowerpots. Plug the drainage hole - a cork can work for this - bury the pot almost to its rim, fill it with water and place a saucer (or an old pair of tights) over the top to reduce evaporation and stop debris and slugs falling in. Larger homemade versions can be made by joining two terracotta pots together.
I rather like the idea of trying a few in the cutting patch next year and seeing how useful they actually are. At the very least, it gives us a legitimate horticultural reason to open a bottle of wine in order to obtain the cork :)
Keep the soil covered
Bare soil exposed to strong sunshine loses moisture, so next year I want to be more conscious of protecting the soil between our plants.
That doesn’t mean squeezing seedlings together and ignoring sensible planting distances. Flowers still need sufficient space and airflow. It means using mulch around them so that less soil is sitting completely exposed to the sun.
Keeping on top of weeds becomes more important when water is scarce too. A large weed growing happily beside your cosmos is drawing water from exactly the same patch of soil. If water is in short supply, I would rather it went to the plant I deliberately put there.
Don’t put the frost fleece away
Lightweight horticultural fleece, which we normally think of as something for protecting plants from cold, can also be used to give vulnerable young plants temporary protection from fierce sunshine.
The important point is not to wrap the plants in fleece. Suspend it above them so that it reduces the intensity of the sun while still allowing plenty of air to circulate underneath.
It is particularly useful for newly planted seedlings during a sudden spell of extreme heat. Apparently our fleece now has two jobs: preventing things from freezing in February and preventing them from cooking in July.
Put large containers on wheels
If you grow flowers in large containers, putting the heaviest ones onto wheeled plant caddies means you can change their position as the seasons change. A pot that benefits from full sun in spring may be much happier with some protection from fierce late-afternoon sunshine during a July heatwave.
Containers have a much smaller reservoir of compost and water than plants growing in the ground, so they dry out particularly quickly. Sometimes moving a container three feet into afternoon shade will be considerably easier than repeatedly trying to replace all the water it is losing.
Experiment with wool in containers
Another interesting idea being tried by gardeners is using horticultural wool or clean, untreated sheep’s wool in containers because wool can absorb and retain water.
I would treat this as an experiment rather than something we all suddenly need to do. Try it in one container and leave another without it, then see whether there is a noticeable difference in how frequently the two need watering.
Please do not sacrifice your favourite cashmere jumper to the cause.
Rethink the little temporary greenhouse
Many of us have small temporary greenhouses that we use for raising our Flower Club seedlings, and traditionally we have tended to put them in the sunniest possible position.
That makes perfect sense in February and March, when warmth and light are exactly what we are trying to provide. It can make considerably less sense during a summer heatwave, when a small plastic greenhouse in full sun can become extremely hot.
The advantage of a temporary greenhouse is that it is temporary. If your garden allows it, consider giving yours two homes: a bright, sunny position for raising seedlings in spring and another position that still receives good light but gets some protection from the fiercest afternoon sun later in the year.
Ventilation matters enormously too. Open doors and vents as temperatures rise and use temporary shading if necessary. We still want plenty of light, but we don’t need to turn the greenhouse into an oven to achieve it.
If you are buying a permanent greenhouse, think about July as well as February
I wouldn’t deliberately build a permanent greenhouse in a shady part of the garden simply because summers are becoming hotter. For much of the year, light is precious, and once a greenhouse has been installed you cannot move it around the garden in search of more winter sunshine.
Instead, choose a bright, open site and make summer temperature control part of the buying decision.
Orientation is worth considering too. An east–west ridge makes particularly good use of limited winter light, whereas a north–south orientation is well suited to spring and summer use because the two sides receive sunlight at different times of the day. For Flower Club growers who mainly want a greenhouse for seed sowing and spring and summer growing, I would certainly consider north–south if the site allows it.
I would also pay far more attention to ventilation than I might have done in the past. When comparing greenhouses, look at the number and size of roof vents, whether there are lower-level vents or louvres, the size of the door and whether automatic vent openers can be fitted. It is also useful to know how easily external shade netting or other greenhouse shading can be added.
A slightly smaller greenhouse with excellent ventilation may prove considerably more useful than a huge glass box that becomes unbearably hot every July.
Encourage plants to develop deeper roots
Once our flowers are established, the aim is generally to water them thoroughly but less frequently rather than giving them a small sprinkle every evening. Deeper watering encourages roots to explore further into the soil, where moisture remains available for longer.
Seedlings and newly planted flowers are different because their root systems are still small. They may need much more frequent watering while they establish, particularly during hot weather. If water becomes scarce, these are the plants I would prioritise.
The important thing is to put the water where it is needed: onto the soil around the root zone rather than indiscriminately over the whole plant and surrounding area.
Keep a trowel beside the watering can
Before watering an established cutting patch, check whether it actually needs it.
The surface of the soil can look extraordinarily dry while there is still moisture lower down. The RHS suggests checking the soil at about 15cm, or six inches, below the surface. If it is still moist there, established plants may not need watering yet.
This is one of the simplest ways of avoiding wasting water. Instead of watering because the surface looks dry or because it is the time of day when you normally water, check what is actually happening around the roots.
Have a plan for grey water
There is also a surprising amount of household water that can potentially be reused on ornamental plants during dry periods. Bath and shower water and some washing-machine rinse water can be used, as can the completely clean water we normally waste while waiting for a shower or tap to run hot.
The RHS recommends using untreated grey water promptly rather than storing it, ideally within 24 hours. Avoid water containing bleach, disinfectants or harsh cleaning products, and dishwasher water is best avoided because of its salt and detergent content.
I also wouldn't put grey water through a drip-irrigation system because fibres, grease and other debris can clog the small emitters. Use a watering can and apply it directly to the soil instead.
Having a bucket in the shower or a washing-up bowl somewhere convenient is a remarkably low-tech irrigation system, but in a hosepipe ban every bucket of water you can reuse is one less you need to find elsewhere.
Use next summer as an experiment
What I like about planning all this now is that we don’t have to find one perfect answer to gardening in hotter, drier summers.
Next year I would like us to try some of these ideas in our own gardens and compare notes. Perhaps put an olla in one area and dripline in another. Improve the soil and mulch it well. Catch more rain. Move the temporary greenhouse when summer arrives. Put a large container on wheels or experiment with wool in a pot, and then notice what actually makes a difference.
That is gardening, really. Every year we sow things, watch what happens, learn something and make changes the following year. This summer has simply given us rather more information than we might have wanted about what happens when our gardens become extremely hot and dry.
We can’t control what next summer will bring, but we have autumn, winter and spring to prepare for it. While you are planning where next year’s Flower Club seeds are going to grow, plan the water at the same time. Improve the soil, capture more rain, work out how you are going to get water efficiently to the roots and think about how you will protect vulnerable plants when temperatures rise.
Then, if we find ourselves facing another 30-degree summer and a hosepipe ban, we won’t be starting from scratch. We’ll already have built a cutting patch that is much better prepared for it.
