By John Warrington
The trouble with an automatic watering system starts when you take your plants off it and start watering by conventional ways, say using fresh water in a watering can. It’s rather like taking the baby off the breast and putting it straight onto cornflakes. Plants have to be weaned off an automatic system to allow for proper root hair development. If weaning does not occur, your plants will not be able to manage the changeover from a period of plentiful supply to having to wait until you get home from the office, by which time they will have begun to suffer. Some people cater for this and water their plants generously before they go to the office in an attempt to give them sufficient moisture for the day. This can often drown them, especially if they are in soil-less compost and in plastic pots when drainage is a problem. Better to pot them first into small clay pots using crocks in the base of the pots for drainage, and use more traditional potting compost. This ensures straightaway that they have proper drainage and can start forming root hairs. The other option of course is to plant them out as soon as possible to help them start forming root hairs, but they will have to be in the shade. Feathered friends
If you take time to just sit quietly in the garden you would be amazed at the bird activity. My garden has birds in it all day, come rain or shine, and throughout the year there are over half a dozen nests in various stages of repair, construction and occupation. Birds are busy creatures and they can often be seen flying ‘home’ with beaks full of straw to build or repair their matrimonial home. I often wonder if these workers are hens or cockbirds, or if it is a cooperative effort. Later on you can often see them going to their nests with beaks full of insects dug up from the ground, caught in flight or taken from the plants in the garden. A nest of fledglings will probably eat tens of thousands of insects before becoming independent. Recently I returned a tiny fledgling to its nest; it had been caught in some branches below. Its mouth was open all the time looking for its breakfast of insects.
My garden must supply hundreds of thousands of insects throughout the year. This pleases me, for many of them are going to be garden pests. Our feathered friends, many of them quite tiny, manage to work out the best time frame for mating, nest building, laying and hatching eggs, so that their young appear at the optimum time for mum and dad to catch the hundreds of thousands of insects needed to rear their family. How do they know what the weather or what the insect population will be like so many weeks in advance? There doesn’t seem to be much antagonism or even competition between the various bird species, although some get their food supply from the ground, or from the tree canopy, some from the bark of trees or from smaller shrubs or even in flight. All levels of the garden’s vegetation seem to be supplying insects, and as I’ve just said many of them are garden pests. It all helps to reduce our dependence on chemicals for pest control. This is excellent, for the less we rely on chemical control the better, for chemicals often do more harm than good.
I wonder if many of you see ladybirds nowadays? I see quite a few in the garden, mostly seven spot, but some with slightly more or fewer spots. These are really great for aphid control, and they quite like to chomp their way through mealy bug infestations. Their numbers very quickly reduce if you use chemicals, so only use these if you have no other option.
Always think of our little friends, take care, and may your God go with you wherever you are.
