"Rain does not fall on one roof alone."

— African proverb

The water butt is empty. There is a crack in the corner of the vegetable bed I can fit two fingers into, the verge along the lane has gone the colour of a paper bag, and I have been carrying watering cans back and forth every evening to soil that has quietly stopped accepting water altogether. Six weeks now without rain worth the name. The garden is struggling on, and so, if I am honest with you, am I.

(5 min read)

Hello friends, Gary Stewart here.

The water butt made a sound this morning that I have not heard it make before. A hollow knock, when I tilted it forward to get at whatever was left in the bottom — the noise of a thing that is empty being asked for something anyway. I got half a watering can out of it. It came out warm and smelling faintly of the inside of a paddling pool, and then the tap sputtered air at me, and that was that.

I have been meaning to connect a second butt to the shed down pipe since March. It is still in its packaging, behind the mower, where I put it.

It has not rained here in any way worth the name since the last week of June. The field behind us was cut early and has not greened since. The lawn has gone beyond brown into something pale and rigid, more surface than plant. Norfolk does this to you. We are the driest county in the country most years, and in a summer like this one the soil stops pretending and remembers what it actually is: solid clay, mostly, with a thin patience laid over the top.

One hour that went nowhere

Last week I watered the raised beds properly, or thought I did. An hour with the watering can, back and forth to the outside tap, the way you do. Then, because something felt wrong about how quickly the surface went pale again, I pushed a finger into the soil beside the dahalia’s.

Two inches down, it was dust. Powder. An hour of carrying water, and I had wet the top half-inch of a bed and nothing else.

What has happened, I have since worked out, is that the soil has gone hydrophobic. When organic matter dries past a certain point it develops a waxy coating that actively repels water; the dryness itself is what makes it hard to rewet. So you pour, and the water beads, and it runs off the high spots and finds the gap between the soil and the timber edge and disappears down the side where it does nobody any good at all. The bed looks watered. The bed is not watered. There is a cruelty in the mechanism that I have not quite got over: the ground becomes least able to drink at exactly the moment it most needs to.

I sat down on the edge of that bed with the empty watering can and felt something I want to be honest about. Not despair; nothing so grand. Just the particular flatness of having done the work and found that none of it went in.

The list

Here is the arithmetic I have been refusing to do.

I have one outside tap, two watering cans, one water butt that is empty and one still in a box, and about an hour on a weekday evening before the light goes and the children need putting to bed. That is my entire capacity. It is not enough for the beds and the allotment and the containers and the new plants, and getting up earlier is not going to make it enough. It has not been enough for a fortnight. I have simply been declining to say so.

So on Sunday I did something that felt, at first, like giving up. I wrote a list of everything I am going to stop watering.

The lawn. The established shrubs. The self sown seeds, which come and go as they please regardless. The border perennials that have been in three years or more and have roots down where I cannot see them. All of it, off the list. And on the list: the containers, which have no subsoil to draw on and will be dead in a day; the newly planted perennials, which have no real root system yet; the cucumbers; in fact all veg at the allotment; which are a wonderful food source; and Cody's sunflower.

Triage is not a gardening word. It belongs to far more serious places than my back garden. But the shape of the thing is the same: when you cannot save everything, you separate what will die without you from what will merely sulk, and then you spend everything you have on the first list and let the second one go brown.

The lawn is allowed to go brown. I have decided this. It is a strange sort of decision to have to make out loud.

What surprised me was how much lighter I felt afterwards. Nothing about the drought had improved — the ground was exactly as hard as it had been an hour before — but I had stopped failing at something impossible and started succeeding at something small. The guilt was never really about the lawn. The guilt was about pretending I could do all of it.

The gardener is also dry

And now the part I have been circling.

August is the month it catches up with me. The March version of me orders the seeds, builds the frames, has firm opinions about crop rotation. The August version waters at half past eight in the evening in a t-shirt he has been wearing since breakfast, thinking mostly about sitting down. Whatever I had in the spring, I have been running on the last of it for weeks now — going through the motions and hoping the motions would generate the feeling, which in my experience they occasionally do and mostly do not.

I have been watering myself the way I was watering those beds. A quick pass, most days, over the surface. Ten minutes here, half an attention there, spread thinly across everything and soaking into none of it. And then wondering why the top half-inch is wet and everything underneath is powder.

On Tuesday, Cody came out of the back door with a jam jar of water held in both hands and the enormous seriousness of a five-year-old on official business. He walked straight past the beds. Past the pots, past the cucumbers, all the way down to the end where his sunflower is — the one he started in a yogurt pot in April and has watched with more sustained attention than I have given anything this summer. He poured the whole jar around the base of it. Then he stood back and looked at it for a while.

One jar. One plant. He did not attempt the garden.

I have thought about that more than is probably reasonable. He had done the triage without ever needing the word for it. He knew what mattered to him, he brought what he could actually carry, and he gave the whole of it to that one thing. He was not overwhelmed by the other forty-four, because he had never taken responsibility for the other forty-four in the first place.

The advice I would give any of you about a dry bed is the advice I have been ignoring in my own life: less often, and deeper, and get it down where the roots are. One long soak that reaches something is worth six sprinklings that reach nothing. It is true of soil. I suspect it is also true of rest, and of attention, and of the people we love, and of whatever it is that keeps sending us back out to the garden in the first place.

What I keep returning to, sitting on the step with the empty can, is that the garden is not asking me to save it. It is doing most of the work itself, down where I cannot see — closing up, holding on, sending roots deeper than they would ever have bothered to go in a wet year. My job is much smaller than I have been treating it. Water the things that cannot wait. Let the rest wait. Stay standing until the weather changes.

Because it will change. That is the one thing I am certain of. Norfolk will get its rain, probably all at once, probably on a day I have washing out, and the lawn will be green again inside a week, and by October I will have forgotten most of this.

But I would like to remember the jam jar.

Gardening Tips

1. Break the surface before you water. If water is beading and running off, the soil is repelling it rather than absorbing it. Scratch over the top inch with a hand fork first, then water in two passes — a small amount to wet the surface, ten minutes' wait, then the real soak. For badly hydrophobic pots, a single drop of washing-up liquid in a full can breaks the surface tension and lets the water through. The Lesson: Something that has been closed a long time does not open on the first approach. Go twice.

2. Deliver the water below the surface. Sink an empty plastic bottle with the base cut off, or a spare plastic pot, into the soil beside anything on your must-water list. Fill that instead of watering the surface. Every drop goes down to the root zone; nothing runs off the top and away down the side of the bed. The Lesson: Help lands better when it goes where the need actually is, rather than where the need is visible.

3. Use the water you have already used. Cooled washing-up water and bath water — nothing with bleach in it — is perfectly good for shrubs, hedging, and ornamentals. Keep a bucket in the shower. It will not go on the salad leaves, but it will keep a young hedge alive, and it costs you nothing but the carrying. The Lesson: Not everything you have already spent yourself on is gone.

Garden To-Do’s

1. Connect the second water butt now, before the rain comes. When a dry spell breaks it tends to break hard, and most of that water runs off the roof and away within the hour. An average shed roof can deliver a few hundred litres from one decent downpour. Do it this week, while the shortage is still annoying you enough to make you act.

2. Stop sowing, and stop feeding. Anything sown into dry ground now needs constant moisture you cannot reliably provide — hold your autumn and overwintering sowings until the rain returns. And do not put liquid feed onto dry soil; it concentrates around the roots and does more harm than good. There will be time to feed. Not yet.

3. Pick little and often. Harvest courgettes, beans, and tomatoes small and frequently. A plant carrying heavy mature fruit is spending water it does not currently have, and picking early takes that demand off it. Pick in the evening or first thing, never in the middle of the day.

Share the Buzz Now!

Share the Embrace Gardening newsletter with someone who is standing in front of a brown lawn and an empty water butt this week, quietly wondering whether they have let the whole thing go.

Here's the link to copy and paste:

www.embracegardening.co.uk

Choose Before the Weather Chooses for You. Deciding what you will not water is not abandonment; it is the only kind of care that survives a long dry spell. Write the list down and put it somewhere you will see it, so the decision is made once rather than remade wearily every evening.

Deep and Rare Beats Shallow and Constant. A quick pass over the surface wets the top half-inch and reaches nothing that matters. This is as true of a Tuesday evening as it is of a raised bed. Give less often, and give it properly, and give it to the roots.

The Rain Is Not Waiting on You. It will come. It always comes, and it will do in one afternoon what none of my carrying could manage in six weeks — falling on the whole garden at once, reaching every place I could not reach, at no cost and by no arrangement of mine. The green that comes back was never gone. It was only underground, holding on, waiting for a day you did not have to organise.

Gary Stewart tries to write every week about what the garden teaches, slowly. If this one landed, pass it on to someone who is carrying more watering cans than they have hands for.

Until next time Embrace Gardening 🌱