Ideas that will catch on here
Post categories: Sally Nex
| 12:01 UK time, Sunday, 13 July 2008
I don't know about you, but watering is the only job around the garden which I find a real chore. And with the Met Office here at Hampton Court giving us dire warnings of low rainfall and scorching temperatures in the coming decades, any tips I can get for cutting back on the time I spend with my watering can are very welcome.
So I jumped at the chance to talk to the team in their cheerfully-coloured, busy show garden, right next door to the . Gardeners in Africa have a thing or two to teach us about growing plants in a drought, and this garden is packed with ideas.
"The idea of a bag garden is that you can grow more vegetables in a smaller space," Kirstine Dunhill, of Send a Cow, tells me. They are tiny, too - hessian sacks about the size of a supermarket carrier bag, yet bursting with healthy veg. There's a secret, of course, to their success.
"They have a central column of stones going down the middle," explains Kirstine. "So rather than the water getting stuck in the top layers, it actually filters all the way through." That means even veg planted through pockets cut in the bottom of the bag get enough water.
To get the column into the centre of the bag (or pot) take a plastic drinks bottle and cut off the neck and base, giving you a plastic tube. Put the tube in the centre of your pot, and fill it with stones. Pack the compost around it, then lift the tube up, leaving the stones in the soil, then repeat until you get to the top of the pot. Voilà : a stone column running through the compost, ready to take water right to the roots where it's needed.
Another fantastic idea I picked up - which could make its way onto my allotment before long - is the keyhole veg bed. This is a raised bed with bells on: it's about 1m (3'6") high, and the outer bed, where the vegetables are growing, slopes down from a central hollow column. There's an access path to the column (giving the bed a "keyhole" shape viewed from above) and inside it is what amounts to a compost bin, held in with hessian: you fill it with kitchen waste, stable manure, grass clippings - whatever you'd put on your compost heap. Then tip on water saved from your washing up, and that's it.
"The idea is that the water will drain through and take all the nutrients with it," explains Kirstine. "It's feeding from below the topsoil, so rather than watering on the surface and all the water evaporating, everything's coming up from underneath."
In Africa, this garden will feed a family of six through the three-month dry period, when crops in the fields simply dry out. In Britain, as we adapt to more hot, dry summers, techniques like these could make all the difference.
So I jumped at the chance to talk to the team in their cheerfully-coloured, busy show garden, right next door to the . Gardeners in Africa have a thing or two to teach us about growing plants in a drought, and this garden is packed with ideas.
"The idea of a bag garden is that you can grow more vegetables in a smaller space," Kirstine Dunhill, of Send a Cow, tells me. They are tiny, too - hessian sacks about the size of a supermarket carrier bag, yet bursting with healthy veg. There's a secret, of course, to their success.
"They have a central column of stones going down the middle," explains Kirstine. "So rather than the water getting stuck in the top layers, it actually filters all the way through." That means even veg planted through pockets cut in the bottom of the bag get enough water.
To get the column into the centre of the bag (or pot) take a plastic drinks bottle and cut off the neck and base, giving you a plastic tube. Put the tube in the centre of your pot, and fill it with stones. Pack the compost around it, then lift the tube up, leaving the stones in the soil, then repeat until you get to the top of the pot. Voilà : a stone column running through the compost, ready to take water right to the roots where it's needed.
Another fantastic idea I picked up - which could make its way onto my allotment before long - is the keyhole veg bed. This is a raised bed with bells on: it's about 1m (3'6") high, and the outer bed, where the vegetables are growing, slopes down from a central hollow column. There's an access path to the column (giving the bed a "keyhole" shape viewed from above) and inside it is what amounts to a compost bin, held in with hessian: you fill it with kitchen waste, stable manure, grass clippings - whatever you'd put on your compost heap. Then tip on water saved from your washing up, and that's it.
"The idea is that the water will drain through and take all the nutrients with it," explains Kirstine. "It's feeding from below the topsoil, so rather than watering on the surface and all the water evaporating, everything's coming up from underneath."
In Africa, this garden will feed a family of six through the three-month dry period, when crops in the fields simply dry out. In Britain, as we adapt to more hot, dry summers, techniques like these could make all the difference.
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