The benefits of watering the garden

The garden is very green and beautiful this year. There's hardly been any powdery mildew on the cucurbits yet - just a few spots, and I pulled the leaves off to stop it spreading.

The cucurbits are absolutely huge as well. Some of that will be down to the fact that I spread large quantities of composted stable manure over the soil before planting. Cucurbits love a good bit of composted manure. I can't imagine all the warmth and sunshine we've had this year hurts either. But I ascribe a lot of this healthy appearance to the fact that I've been watering regularly. In fact, I've been watering on most days when it doesn't rain. For comparison, here were my cucurbits last year on around 17 July 2016:

17 July 2016

It's not just my cucurbits, it's also my sweet corn (although admittedly this year I'm growing a different variety and kept it in the greenhouse for longer than I kept 2016's in the house). Here's the corn today (4 July 2017):

4 July 2017

4 July 2017

And here it was on around 17 July 2016:

17 July 2016

As people keep pointing out, it looks much healthier this year. You'll also notice that everything's in a different location because I've been rotating my crops.
In case you were in any doubt, here are the sunflowers I've been watering most days this year:

 

And here are the sunflowers I left to their own devices:

It's hard to believe those photos were taken on the same day, but they were.

I've also discovered that when packets of seeds tell you you need to water regularly until established, they mean "if you want all your seedlings to grow and not just die of thirst shortly after germination". I didn't lose all the seedlings I didn't water daily, but I got fewer gaps in my rows that I did water every day.

What brought on all this watering? Well, two things. The arrival of the new shed with its guttering to catch all that water and the arrival of the water butts to store it in.

We had enough rain to fill the first one fairly soon after it was plumbed in, so I started watering to use it up, because I was worried we'd have so much rain that the overflow would be large enough in quantity to damage the garden.
Watering was a revelation. Everything in the garden looked so healthy and grew so well. I couldn't bear to let it dry out again when the water ran out. So I started watering with the hose every day when I didn't have any water left in the water butts. I do have some environmental guilt about that, especially as I'm using water that's been processed to a drinking standard. But I've carried on anyhow and soothe my conscience by eating the vegetables and using water from the water butts whenever it's available.

Sweet corn cob at an early stage

Sweet pea

Sweet pea

Up the garden path