After weeks of near misses, with the rain slipping past us up the Bristol Channel and into South Wales, today the rain gods smiled on us. Only 8.9 mm – less than half the forecast amount but nonetheless the best we’ve had for ages and when it dried up after lunch, we could almost hear the allotment gratefully guzzling it down.
However much you water by hand, it’s never as good as a natural soaking. I don’t know whether plants are affected by chlorinated water – it used to be the case that if you stood the water in a trough or even in a watering can overnight, the chlorine would evaporate leaving pretty much pure water (apart from the innumerable chemicals that couldn’t be filtered out). However I read recently that there are new ways of treating water with chlorine that persists for a longer period. I suspect that chlorine in any form has a deleterious effect on soil micro-organisms – the ones it’s used to kill in the pipes drrrr..
So rainwater is good and thunderstorm rainwater is even better as long as it’s not heavy enough to beat the plants flat. In fact, gardeners could probably furnish a whole vocabulary of rain types based on their usefulness. This occurred to me this morning as I looked out of the window at the Green and was faintly disappointed with the rain at first, until it increased a little and suddenly I could hear it falling on the leaves.
We instinctively judge rain and its qualities by sound and smell as much as by any other more scientific quality. Compare, for example the first few drops of rain falling in a summer storm – big fat, heavy drops, with – let’s say – the sound of misty rain drifting down on to a window, or driven rain coming in almost horizontally in a winter storm. Any gardener would opt for a prolongued spell of the gentle but continuous rain that falls on a windless day, followd by warm sunshine – perfect growing weather.
And it was while I was imagining those big fat drops I remembered a pub we used to drink at, on a busy crossroads opposite a stand of very tall elms – before Dutch elm disease took its toll. There was a big rookery up in the trees, and if you were lucky enough to be sitting on the bench outside the pub on a hot summer day when the raindrops started to fall, whack, whack, whack on the leaves and then gathered in intensity as the sky turned to Paynes Grey straight from the tube, and the agitated birds called and chattered, and that unique smell of rain on hot tarmac and parched grass rose into the air, then you might have been transported to the Potwell Inn for a moment, until the rain drove you inside. The very thought of it left me pining for a lost age, and given half a chance I’d have got ino the car with (protesting) Madame and driven straight there. But the pub has shut down, the elms have all gone and a housing estate covers the fields almost to the edge of the road. Nostalgia eh? rubbish emotion!
And so the allotments have been properly watered at last with the right kind of rain. The rain you don’t want is the stuff they get in North Wales where it rains sideways and each drop is encrusted with industrial diamonds that saw you in half; or in Cornwall where it rains every day, but only just enough to be annoying, or up the M5 along the ridge north from Bristol where it often doesn’t rain at all but just sits there in a cloud sulking in a fog. You don’t want the rain that comes with gusting winds, or anything that comes with hailstones, and especially not snow that breaks your nets and snaps off branches.
Moderation in all things is the name of the game, and the only way to do that is to protect the crops as best you can with nets and windbreaks and if you’re luckier than us, polytunnels, and save every drop of rainwater you can. Oh and concentrate on drought resistant varieties species and varieties. There’s always a way: except there isn’t when things get past the tipping point, and then it all gets ugly. But unlike buses, you can save rain until you neeed it.
