In the UK farmers and gardeners have a problem right now. It hasn’t been raining. This famously wet country isn’t damp at all.
We aren’t set up for coping with drought.
My wife and I had a 100 liter rainwater barrel (water butt) last year. It ran dry when we had a summer drought. We added another 168 liter water barrel this spring. All of that ran dry several days ago and rain isn’t in the forecast until maybe a few showers this coming weekend.
Summer drought is becoming a habit of the shifting climate pattern. We’d better figure out what to do about it.
Farmers grapple with it on a large scale. V and I and various friends must grapple with it on a smaller scale.
This isn’t purely about growing vegetables and fruit.
Some people aren’t waiting for authorities to tell them to help wildlife. We’ve just had No Mow May, which is extending into June so the insects can have a better chance at wildflowers. A few grumpsters complain about how scruffy villages look with verges and lawns unmown. They are countered by people exclaiming about the beauty of the wildflowers, which tolerate dry spells better than lawn grass or domesticated plantings. Would you rather have neatly trimmed dead grass or scruffy little flowers everywhere?
On Friday night, Knit Club sat outside in a member’s back garden until it was so dark the swifts had finished their dinner and the bats were flying. At this time of year, that’s pretty late. We’re in the portion of the year when there is still a hint of sunlight near the horizon even in the middle of the night.
The particular garden where we met is about to be redone. Veggie beds will move forward toward the house. The large back section will be sculpted and planted to become more of a mini-woodland. After a few years it will be multi-layered, like a natural woodland, and low maintenance. We all admire the sketched plans.
Another Knit Club member has been focused on repairs and energy improvements at her house, from insulation to solar power. That is finishing this month. Next she plans to remove paving left around the house by its previous owners and re-wild her garden.
We’re all doing one project or another to make our gardens friendlier for wildlife.
But this new pattern of summer weather poses a challenge. How can we protect at least some of the plants against these droughts? Sometimes a dry spell goes on so long that even the wildflowers need help.
Recently one of my brother’s friends in Texas posted photos on Facebook of what she is putting into her veggie garden. I had never heard of olla pots. She briefly explained them.
The idea is simple. Olla pots are unglazed pottery. Classic shapes have a capacious round belly and a narrow neck with a removable lid. You bury the pots in the garden, spaced out appropriately. You fill them with water and put the lid on to prevent evaporation. Water seeps gradually through the walls of the pots. To the plants, it is a Goldilocks watering system. Their roots get just enough moisture, not too much, not too fast and not too little either. It is even possible to hook up a source such as a water barrel in a way that uses gravity to automatically top up the ollas as the water level in them falls. Click here if you want to learn more about them.
Yesterday I brought up the idea with gardening expert Sue. Like us, she was using city water for a portion of her garden that is struggling with our lack of rain. Like us, she wasn’t happy about needing to resort to that. Many reservoirs for drinking water haven’t fully recovered from last year’s summer drought.
The big pots going into the ground in Texas might not work well in our neighborhood. We have high clay content in our soil. It swells when wet and shrinks when dry, moving things and exerting pressure. It might crack the pots. But droughts here are not as long and deep as in the American southwest (at least, not so far). We may be able to use the concept with smaller vessels, and ideas abound for making do-it-yourself ollas with varying sizes. Clay will not let the water move the way we want, but we’ve done so much to improve the organic content of our soil, it might work.
As Sue mentioned, we need to adapt our methods to go with the changing climate. Olla pot technology is thousands of years old, sturdy and reliable. If small DIY versions can stay intact in our soil and not get too swamped by our wet seasons, maybe we can make our water barrels carry us further through summer droughts.
I feel like a kid in a candy store. This experiment is going to be fun.
I'd never heard of the olla method of watering. I hope it works for you. Oklahoma had a drought last summer, too, but this year we've had plenty of Spring rain and there's a super bloom of prairie flowers at the wildlife refuge. My own brand spanking new native wildflower garden has needed little additional watering and the rains are just the boost it needed. I chose varieties that could withstand dry soil, but the first year they really need watering. Last year my pear and apple trees had nothing (I think there was a freeze during bloom time when I was in Florida) and this year they are loaded. I wish we'd do more to reverse climate change, but in the meantime we all must adapt.