Home » Plants & Animals » Beginning a Garden » Watering 101: Keeping your Garden Happy this Summer

Watering 101: Keeping your Garden Happy this Summer

© Kate Berry

Two days ago, I watched my garden mercilessly pounded by 4 inches of rain. I watched the rainwater well up, swirl and eddy, then carry my mulch down the garden paths and deposit it in congealed, sticky masses of muddy grass clippings. I cringed as my glads and lilies, their bulbs unearthed by the erosion, toppled and sunk into the mire. Even Hubby choked back a tear as we watched the cornstalks in our vegetable patch lie down like wounded soldiers, their battle with the rain simply too much to take.

Six inches of rain fell in 48 hours, bringing us a total rainfall of 11 inches for the month of June. It is the wettest summer on record here. It is, in fact, the wettest year I've experienced since moving to the Midwest over a decade ago.

But I am an optimist. As I look out over my garden, where the paths are now better mulched than the plants, I am determined not to let this muddiness daunt me. I will replant those glads and lilies. I will carefully lift each leaf of my foxgloves and wipe off the mud with my hands. I will fill wheelbarrows with the muddy, erstwhile mulch and replace it. And, as the storm clouds gather overhead again today, I will shake my hand at the skies much like Scarlet O'Hara and vow that, with God as my witness, I will never be without a garden again.

And so, in that optimistic vein, I am anticipating the days when my garden will be once again blooming. I am imagining the sunny summer skies that will stretch over the Midwest like an endless cerulean blanket any day now. I am daydreaming of hot August climes inevitably baking the earth until it is deeply riddled with lines and cracks like my grandmother's cheeks, of sultry afternoons spent languishing under the shade of an oak tree with a tall glass of iced tea in my hand.

As strange as it seems today, when gallons of brackish water pour from my overflowing pond and rush mercilessly through my herbs, I am thinking of drought.

Drought is the bane of the garden. Water is essential to plant physiology, to photosynthesis, and to a plants ability to transport and store nutrients in its structure. But, as I have recently discovered, when it comes to water, too much of a good thing is simply too much.

The copyright of the article Watering 101: Keeping your Garden Happy this Summer in Beginning a Garden is owned by . Permission to republish Watering 101: Keeping your Garden Happy this Summer in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.