5 Tips to Save Your Vegetable Garden After Too Much Rain

Five different tips for managing a garden that’s just getting dumped on by rain:

Tip number one, not all plants will respond the same way to a lot of rain.

For example, lettuce is a shallow rooted plant that loves cold, cold weather. And so if that’s the case, what happens in the rain? Weather’s cold. It’s perking up, it’s looking nice and crispy, but the water’s just not going to drown it out because it’s a shallow root. And so all that water, if it is waterlogged is sitting below the root zone of lettuce. So lettuce really doesn’t suffer a whole lot from too much rain.

Citrus on the other hand does not want to be overwatered. So if you are growing in containers, I highly recommend to shelter it away from the storm to avoid over-watering. And if you have the ability to move plants around, please do so, so that the plants would not suffer from too much rain.

Tip number two is to watch out for nutrients washing out of your soil or your container.

So this is probably more prevalent if you’re a container gardener, but even if you’re growing in raised beds, you can get water just kind of pouring through that soil system and then it’s taking along all of the soluble nutrients with it. If there’s too much, you know, if you water appropriately and you get an appropriate amount of rain, then it doesn’t actually leave that soil. But if it’s washing, the nitrogen can just wash straight out. So the way to remedy that perhaps would be to add a top dress of some organic granular fertilizer or add some back after you have too much rain.

Tip number three is to consider raised beds or containers.

If your soil has naturally poor drainage, if you’re very heavy clay, you’re growing in ground and a torrential downpour just doesn’t even, it doesn’t even move the water just kind of sits there. Your soil and your roots are not going to like that. And so switching over to some containers or some raised beds, which really are containers. We just think of them as a separate design because they’re so large.

So if you are struggling with really poor drainage in your natural soil, I do recommend you’re either gonna have to improve that somehow by adding a lot of compost, maybe adding perlite, things like this, or you may want to switch over to raised beds.

Tip number four is the use of mulch in the garden.

Mulch keeps our soil moist, right? It’s protecting the surface of the soil. So in the rain you might say a thick layer of mulch may not be such a good thing and you would actually be correct. It will hold perhaps too much water. It, it makes it too hard for the soil to dry out when it’s already suffering from too much water. So you may want to consider mulching a little bit less using a lighter mulch. And at the same time mulch can be a nice bed and a nice home for the two common pests that come out when it rains. And that would be snails and slugs. And so if you kind of dial back your mulch a little bit, that can actually help quite a bit. Now I will say in general, mulch is a fantastic thing to use in the garden and even in the rain, sometimes it can help, right? A light layer of mulch can help prevent soil splashing up, particularly onto things like your tomatoes, your peppers, your summer crops that will get a lot of those soil born blights. And so you want, you do want to use mulch at some point, but just don’t go crazy with the mulch when it’s raining.

Tip number five is to inspect your crops in the rain and look for signs of pests, nutrient deficiencies and disease, specifically disease.

The rain, those moist conditions, those humid conditions can bring out a decent amount of disease. It’s a breeding ground for all sorts of different things. So look through the garden and see if your plants have any disease. And if you see any disease, be sure to mitigate it as soon as possible to avoid any severe damage.

Those are our five rainy garden tips. So with that said, good luck in the garden. Happy Gardening!

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