Rain!

Even a dry garden gets some rain. 203 liters/sqm between October and March. I have no idea whether that’s a lot for this region but at the beginning of the week alone we had 60 liters/sqm. With deep puddles in the garden and on the gravel parking lot because the clay soil can’t take a lot of water at any one time.

Everything put in another explosive spurt of growth, so today I spent several hours cutting out and ripping out unwanted weeds as well as quite a bit of the masses of self-seeded corn poppies, fumaria, and erodium that were beginning to crowd out the shrubs I planted last fall.

I am curious to see which of those shrubs will survive since a few of them are drought specialists, demanding a rather well drained soil. I tried to help by putting in lots of gravel and coarse sand when planting but that may not have been enough. I did not want a complete gravel garden and so it remains a balancing act or rather gardening by trial and error.

Note: The picture shows rain in August of 2023.