‘The dribble, the power dribble, the drencher, the mister, and the vaguely usable sprinkle’

A basic guide to watering for gardeners should be the subject of a book, something like: How to Water. Nigella Lawson turned out a book a few years ago entitled, How to Eat which was obviously not about how to move your jaw around and keep all the stuff inside. We did all that with Heinz baby meals and the good old train heading for the tunnel (laden with something that tasted like wallpaper paste).

Neither was it about nipping out to a little brasserie or sticking your fingers in cream. The simplicity of the title begged a question – what was it really about?

And very much the same could be said of ‘How to Water’. The answer is simple: you fill a watering can and pour. Or in my wife’s case, you check with the nearest reservoir to see what their levels are like and then turn on the garden hose. We water stuff all the time in summer, but do we really know what we’re doing?

Being of a grumpy and naturally mean-minded disposition I’m the one in the family who empties all the water butts before even thinking about going for the hose. Last winter I managed to find (to use the phrase of legendary Welsh poet ‘Shadwell’) ‘the bargainest goldmine ever’ two water butts at our local Squires garden centre that had been reduced to £5 each. They held water fine, they’d just been discoloured after a season outdoors, so I leapt on them like a man eager to fill his car with green polycarbonate.

This summer, their contents have been reduced to zero pretty quickly and I’ve been forced into using the hose a lot more than I’m happy with. Our water is metered and so it is carefully used. I’d like to think that this was a result of ongoing eco-friendliness and a passion for water conservation, but no, it’s just straightforward thrift.

Actually, nothing made me happier than a few summers ago when we had a hosepipe ban in the South-East. Once baths were finished in the Grump household, it was a case of ‘upstairs with the watering can’ to collect. ‘Plants won’t mind a little bit of soap’ we were advised, and incredibly, they didn’t.

Banning hoses also irritated the hell out of a former neighbour – nicknamed ‘The Weasel’ - who lived for his grass. In summer he would get the sprinkler out every other day. He weeded, aerated, rolled, supplemented, mowed, fluffed and manicured his lawn as though he were expecting Hozelock to come round any minute and invite him to provide the backdrop to their latest product photography.

In a way I was quite sorry when the hosepipe ban came to an end and the nightly ritual of bathing the plants came to an end. By that time the hydrangeas were more than happy to relax in a Radox bath rather than get the stuff neat from the mains. You see the problem I have with watering, apart from the profligacy of the hose, is the infernal multi-nozzle.

We have one of those nozzles that can give you seven-different water streams. It seems like a brilliant idea when you’re in the shop, but in practice none of them give you <i>quite</i> what you need. Some, like the mister, you might as well not bother with. The only thing that’s ever been used for is to cool down very hot children Those who own such a nozzle will know the array: There’s the dribble, the power dribble, the drencher, the mister, the vaguely usable sprinkle and the jet – which depending on the kinks in the hose, gives you either a modest trickle or a water-based weapon capable of rooting out a 5-litre lavender at ten paces.

Due to my basic inability to maintain a straight hose, the watering process is usually heavily punctuated with pauses to un-kink the thing. This in turn twists the hose in the mounting where it enters the multi-nozzle, which then likes nothing better than to free itself from any connection with the hose. The result is an explosion of water and swearing and the remainder of the process is done direct from the hose itself with one or more saturated trouser legs and a squelchy welly.

My wife, AKA The Diluvian One, also suffers from this. However she is far more patient than me and will stand with a hose emptying out at full-whack over a couple of patio pots for several minutes at a time. She won’t move on till the last remaining molecule of Nitrogen, Potassium or Phosphorous has stopped clinging on by its molecule-tips, to the roots in the pot, and the compost is free of all nutrient.

But watering is more than just how much you put on, it’s also about where you put it on and to some degree, when you put it on. I read somewhere that it’s best to water the ground around cucumbers not their leaves. In this age of water conservation we should have that kind of information to hand about every plant we buy.

At the moment we get a paucity of information about (sometimes quite expensive) plants – ‘Perennial. Likes shade or half-shade’ is about as much as you can hope for on the label, along with its potential height provided you don’t accidentally strim it during its first season. We should maybe find out more about their watering requirements, too… FH

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