I’m not going to waste my time trying to convince you that a drought is exactly a good thing. Clearly a proper, 1976-style drought is very bad news indeed, for all kinds of reasons. But purely from a gardening perspective, a bit less rain than usual is not all bad. So on the principle that one should always look on the bright side, let me give you three reasons to welcome another fine, sunny day.
First of all, put your hand up if you really enjoy mowing the lawn. I thought so — not too many of you. Few things cause more angst than a brown lawn, but a dry lawn grows more slowly than a wet one, and a brown lawn doesn’t grow at all.
Brown grass is not a sign that the lawn is dead, it’s just the natural way the grass shuts down until it rains again, when it will miraculously recover.
There is never any need to water an established lawn. If you don’t believe me, this is the official advice from the Turfgrass Growers Association (turfgrass.co.uk), whose members grow 70 per cent of the UK’s turf, so they should know.
In fact, watering your lawn during a drought does more harm than good. It encourages weeds and diseases, makes your soil more easily damaged by trampling and encourages surface rooting – so watering now means that your lawn is more likely to suffer from drought in the future.
Newly laid lawns do need watering but only for the first month — after that they should be able to look after themselves.
If you don’t want your lawn to go brown in the first place, here are a few other things you can do:
1 Keep your mower blades sharp.
2 Apply an occasional light top-dressing of soil or compost.
3 Don’t use fertiliser: if your lawn isn’t growing, it doesn’t need feeding.
4 Remove thatch with a lawn rake.
5 Most important of all, increase mowing height: taller grass has deeper roots, and also helps to shade and cool the ground. In time of drought, don’t cut lower than 35-40mm.
A second reason to be philosophical about drought is that weeds need water just like other plants. Annual weeds, which need water for their seeds to germinate, are particularly dependent on rainfall. So less rain means fewer seedlings of hairy bittercress, groundsel, chickweed and annual meadow grass. Many perennial weeds rely mainly on seeds to get around too: think dandelions, willowherbs, docks, pearlwort and plantains.
Not only do all these plants need water to germinate, but wet soil makes their seedlings much harder to kill. There are few more unrewarding pastimes than hoeing seedlings of annual meadow grass on a wet day, only to return days later to find that most of them are still happily growing and flowering away. In dry weather there will be many fewer weed seedlings to start with, and when you kill them, they will stay dead.
Last but far from least, less rain means fewer slugs, or at any rate lower slug activity. In spring, when seeds are germinating and new shoots are just emerging, plants are at their most vulnerable to slugs. In fact slugs will eat seedlings of plants that they wouldn’t (or couldn’t) look at twice as mature plants. Even tree seedlings are in danger from slugs; in one Swedish study, slugs wiped out more than two thirds of Scots pine seedlings, but only if it rained — in dry weather few seedlings were attacked.
The lesson is to water seedlings, young plants and anything newly planted, but to do so carefully, applying the water only where it is needed. Spraying it everywhere will only attract slugs and persuade more weeds to germinate. Also try to water in the morning so that surface soil is dry by evening, which will discourage slugs. A useful discipline is to get used to using a watering can. You’ll have no choice if your water company has imposed a hosepipe ban, and the exercise will do you good.
Ken Thompson is a plant biologist with an interest in the science of gardening. He has written four books, the latest of which is Do We Need Pandas? The Uncomfortable Truth About Biodiversity