Growth out of synch due to drought, says local gardener
The dry weather this summer has affected growth on farms and in gardens, but many members of the local gardening club were prepared and are ready for their annual show this weekend.
Danny Dunne, chairperson of Mullingar and District Gardening Club, harvests rainwater from the roof of his house, garage and shed, and has a store for some 5,000 litres for his garden. Though that is a large quantity, he found that he was running low till the rain over the August bank holiday weekend replenished his supplies.
The ground remains dry, he said: "I was using it sparingly but last weekend one of the two tanks at the tunnel was nearly empty. I have a reserve tank, so it was ok, and then with that rain, it actually had filled up overnight.
"But the ground is parched dry. I was digging out potatoes yesterday (last Wednesday), and on the surface, the ground is wet, but down deep, it is hard and bone dry. The worms aren’t on the surface, they’re way down deep in the soil."I’ve never seen anything like it, never seen it this dry – but having said that, we have flowers, vegetables haven’t been great, but we have some potatoes, some onions, tomatoes in the greenhouse.
"The flowers are good, but the annual flowers are very scarce. You sow the seed now early in the spring and they flower during the summer and they seed and die. They haven’t been great, they’re a bit sparse, but the rest, the herbaceous perennials, are okay because they go deep down into the soil."
Danny has found that some plants are coming late and some are coming early; "they’re out of sync with their season".
"Even the birds, there’s not many of them around, though I do have a little robin in the garden and he’s nearly bullying us around the place. He comes very close, but he’s fine."
He has noticed fewer cabbage butterflies, "but I’ll tell you what’s plentiful and that’s why I don’t use any sprays – hoverflies. They’re like a tiny little wasp and their wings fly as fast as hummingbird, and they consume greenfly, they’re your friend in the garden. There’s plenty of them.
"And a thing that has happened with us here (Gaybrook), every year for the last five years, I’ve had a swarm of bees at the house. I’ve had to have them removed twice and another twice they went away. This summer, I’ve had two swarms of bees."
What would he put that down to? "There are a number of reasons, and the main one, man who looks after the bees says, our house is on the flight path of swarms, and some of them can be just resting. But if they don’t rest and go, I have to have them removed.
"Having two swarms has never happened to us before. A friend of mine said he had a nest of bees in the hedge; his son got stung with them, and when the man came and investigated, they were actually Spanish wasps, so he took them away and destroyed them. But the ordinary domestic wasps we have here, I see very few of them.
"It’s just everything seems to be out of sync. The lawn is parched, but I don’t worry about that, because that’ll bounce back."
Annual show
The Mullingar and District Gardening Club annual Gardening Club Show takes place in the Parish Community Centre (beside the Cathedral) on Saturday August 15 (2-5pm).
It’s an open show, so non-club members are welcome to enter produce and to visit. Schedules are available at Shaw’s Hardware Mullingar or O’Meara’s Garden Centre in Gaybrook. The deadline for entries is Tuesday August 11 at 5pm.