Water

     It is late Summer here, and February is often the hottest time of the year. The majority of my gardening time is taken up by daily watering. I try to fit it in at the beginning or end of the day, when it's not too sunny. The days are warm and the sound of chittering cicadas is in the air. My Summer veggies are loving it. I am getting plenty of cherry tomatoes, and even a few off the larger tomato plant.

 A lot of my other Summer veggies got a late start due to the late cold/stormy weather at the end of Spring. I just harvested my first beans a couple days ago. I am keeping an eye on the first of hopefully many courgettes. Usually we have more courgettes than we know what to do with by now. I have one beautiful little butternut squash getting bigger every day - I hope it sets at least a few more by Fall. 

     I am getting a small handful of blueberries and one or two strawberries a day right now. Its not a lot but I'm enjoying them. I put them on top of my granola in the morning. I do dream of increasing my berry growing capacity in the years to come.

     I have also managed to keep my late-planted peas from getting demolished by the snails and they are starting to take off. I tried a little cone shaped trellis - a method often recommended for beans and peas because it is easy to make and very stable. It turned out to be the wrong thing for this spot. The peas all climbed round to the side of it where the sun is strongest, and they're now running out of room. The cage-style trellis I put round my peas-in-a-pot last Fall worked a lot better for a circular planting.

     I have been thinking about water lately. I have dreams of installing water catchment tanks eventually, but that takes money and time and planning. In short, I'm not sure when I will get to it, but I've realised that doesn't have to stop me from doing what I can with what I have right now. What I happen to have is one drain pipe that empties straight onto the ground, a bucket, and a couple of 20 liter water tanks. The bucket fits under the pipe. When it's raining, and I think of it, I go dump out the contents into the water tanks. If I keep at this and add my watering can into the mix, I can capture about 60 liters of water this way. It's not much but it's enough to water the garden for a couple of days. 

     Seeing as the bucket has a broken handle, tipping it into the tanks was the most fiddly part, so I added a new bit of technology to the set-up: a few feet of plastic tubing. I involved my son in setting this up, turning it into a physics project as well. If you can get the tubing into two containers that are level with each other, keeping the tube completely full of water, the water will flow through the pipe until the water level is the same in each container. I used this method to connect the pipe from the bucket to a water tank, and now the water in the bucket will flow into the tank on its own. It's a very low tech system with a not very impressive capacity, but it is a thousand times better than nothing, and I absolutely love it. 

     If I wanted to improve it further, I could add another tube to the second tank. In fact you can add tanks and tubes to a system like this as much as you'd like. While I do love having the perfect tool for the job, this is this other aspect to gardening that I love - improvising with what you have. The basics of gardening are incredibly simple, and there's a million ways to do it. You can grow a plant just as well in a purpose-built pot or an old toilet bowl. There's huge scope for improvising and upcycling. And I love anything I can do that is a little bit better for the environment. Capturing even a little rain water helps with water conservation, and rainwater is also better for our plants than tap water. Doing what you can with what you have right now; it's something worth keeping in mind in all areas of life, not just the garden.