Monday, November 11, 2013

Deliciously soggy


Every gardener in Sydney will be pleased to see the rain falling these last few days. It's been a long time between drinks for our parched gardens. The last good falls were back in June and every local gardener can tell you how dry the soil is once you dig down a couple of inches. Watering by hand just isn't the same as having vast cloud-lakes of water falling from the sky.

I'm such a rain radar junkie that I also have the rain radar
app on my iPhone. I love looking at them. The red patches are
seriously heavy rain, yellow fairly heavy, dark blue is good
garden-friendly rain and light blue is very kind to vegie seedlings.
The lovely thing about rainy days is doing nothing much at all. All you have to do is watch, if you want to do that. One thing I will do during a brief break in the rain, though, is head out to the garden shed, get out the Dynamic Lifter (ie, chicken poo) and sprinkle a few handfuls to each of my newly planted gardenias, which so far are doing OK but not great. I guess lots of other plants will get the poultry-based aromatherapy, too.

If you've ever read a gardening magazine, they always say that the ideal way to fertilise plants is to water the ground first, spread around the fertiliser, then water it all in well. So, on a rainy day, wait for a break in the rain, behave like a mad person and do your fertilising then, then dash back under shelter and watch the rain wash the plant food down into the soil. Enjoy.



2 comments:

Lanie said...

I was that mad person you describe Jamie. How great was that rain? I think my zucchini trombocino grew a metre a day!

Jamie said...

And the rain can stop now. I think we've had enough for the meantime...