Saturday Morning With Jack Tame

Gardening in a dry, hot timeAlways tricky; evaporation and transpiration really take it out of the ground and the plant’s system.Water when it gets cooler (late evening or better still: really early morning).Try not water all over the plants – it needs to end up in the root zone, so aim for that.Water on leaves causes burning and that hurts the plants.Droplets can act as a microscopic lens that magnifies the sun rays.Imagine an upside-down plastic bottle buried into the root-zone of a shrub… with its bottom cut off.Now fill the bottle with water and that water slowly leaks out of the neck under the soil surface right into the zone where the roots are.Easy to re-fill and therefore delivering the water exactly where it’s needed(not on the leaves, but on the roots)Instead of just water: put some very diluted liquid fertiliser in; water and minerals at the same time!Sprinklers are quite dodgy: the small droplets will largely disappear (evaporation) before they hit the ground;Also: you can’t really control where t