Our growing season is getting longer. It has increased by about 29 days since the 1960s. We have warmer beginnings and warmer endings – both spring and autumn are milder than half a century ago, but also more unpredictable because of climate change.
Mid spring, particularly April, has in recent years been drier, with temperatures occasionally reaching the high 20s. This is a key month for sowing and planting out, but it can present challenges as we swing from wetter winters into sudden heat and drought, and back again – as June and July are often duller, wetter months. Your strength to weather this (pun intended) depends on your soil.
The more organic matter you can incorporate into your soil through mulches and compost, the better it will be able to hold on to and let go of water, by the miraculous work of the soil food web community. Mulches on the surface will also insulate that precious top layer and slow down surface evaporation, further helping to protect the community below.
I sieve the best of my homemade compost to mulch around young seedlings and plants. Use rougher compost to earth up potatoes or place around squashes and beans once they are thriving. If you don’t have home compost, you could use spent compost from last year’s pots, grass clippings (but make sure there’s no weed killer in it), straw or bark mulch.
If it’s been dry for a week or more when sowing or planting out, you need to adjust how you go about things. This doesn’t mean delaying this work, but taking care to conserve water in the soil. If it’s unseasonably hot (22C or higher), don’t sow in the middle of the day as water will evaporate quickly; wait till early evening. Absorbing water is the first part of germination and if a seed can’t get enough water in the first few critical hours, it halts the process.
If the soil is dry when sowing direct, water where you will sow first, wait until this has drained away, water again, then sow and cover the seeds with dry soil. The dry top layer will act like a mulch and slow down evaporation. Using the back of a small rake or hoe, draw back the top layer of soil to one side of where you will sow, then use this dry soil to cover your watered-in seeds. It is amazing how effective this method is. It also means that you can be very precise with where you water, which results with less surface weed and seeds getting a head start from a good drenching.
It is the same principle for planting out; use a dry mulch after watering to conserve water. Finally, with anything that you’ve recently planted, if doesn’t rain hard, carry on watering. You have to keep this up till you see a new set of leaves, a sign that the plant’s roots are bedding down.
