04/08/2026
Let’s look at different ways to water or conserve moisture for your home grown produce.
Ancients didn’t have hosepipes connected to the mains so they had to find ways of watering if they wanted a crop. For bigger areas there techniques such as Swales, depressions, rain gardens & hugelculture.
Most domestic growers have a few smaller areas/beds so what can you do to cut down watering or conserve moisture in those?
The first best practice is the soil itself, if you have soil with no body to it then the water is just going to run off. Your soil needs to have plenty of organic matter in it to hold any watering that you need to do. I would always advocate that you make your own compost, you then have a closed loop which is sustainable growing (that’s your first brownie point 😊)
You can add well rotted manure (check that the animals have not grazed on sprayed pasture!)
You can add something called biochar (a charcoal type material) it is good for soil fertility, it helps retain water and improves nutrient availability plus it locks in carbon (you are helping to mitigate climate change, another brownie point 😊)
Leaves! It dumbfounds me that people collect up all the fallen leaves in autumn and put them in their green waste bin 😣 (which they are paying for) and then go and buy a commercially processed product to add to the soil 🤷♀️Gather them up by all means but then put them on top of your soil and let the worms do the rest!
Wood ash. If you have a wood burning stove then save some of that ash! Not all of it, too much is not good either but you can add a bit to your compost or sprinkle lightly on the beds in winter. (Look this one up if you are keen to use yours)
The next thing is to stop any moisture evaporating in these high temperatures. Bare soil dries out quickly, erodes and loses nutrients.
Mulch, mulch, mulch 😂 you can use a purpose made mulch such as Strulch. I use this on the cut flower beds and it is fabulous (though expensive)
You can also use grass clippings, wood bark, straw (not hay it is full of seeds!) and those leaves again 🤪 Sheep wool is another good one if you can get it.
There are other items you can use to cut down any watering time especially during a hose pipe ban.
Solar powered irrigation pumps that attach to your water butt. Great bits of kit that will water for you while you are busy elsewhere.
Ollas, you may have never heard of them but they have been around for millennia! Porous terracotta pots that are buried into your veg bed and filled with water. No pumps, no electrics just physics. The dry soil pulls water from the porous olla, if the soil doesn’t need water, the water stays in the olla until it is called for by the soil, genius if you ask me. You can buy purpose made ones (and mine came packaged in sheep wool, bonus) or you could make them from an unglazed terracotta plant pot, seal the bottom hole and put a lid of some kind on it to stop evaporation and insects falling in.
If you have room in your beds create depressions or ‘rills’ to hold the water long enough for the plant roots to draw from it (these are subtle not trenches and holes 😂)
There are plenty of other diy ways to get that water down to the root level rather than sit on the surface where it will quickly evaporate undoing your hard work.
