We usually associate rainy days with staying indoors, and either getting caught up on work or household chores, or just taking it easy and watching a movie. I associate rainy days with gardening, and I call them ‘moving days’, because rainy days are ideal for moving and rearranging your plants. In this episode I will talk about how and why I do this, and I will also speak to some listener questions.

Here’s the thing about a good rainy day

If you have a permaculture garden, and the whole garden is covered in mulch, the rain is like a shot in the arm for the whole garden. Whereas conventional gardens get a short term dose of water, permaculture gardens get a long term watering, every time it rains. The mulch swells up with moisture, and the organically rich soil absorbs the water, and for days, the soil is rich and moist, facilitating growth at an optimum rate for every plant in the garden. In all the ways that matter, a mulched garden is an automatic watering system, because the moisture levels in the soil stay constant due to the mulch, and the wonderful effect that it has on the soil. But it doesn’t stop there:

Moving Day

When I plant things that I intend to move at a later date, I plant thick. I put more seeds in the row than I really want there, because I know that at some later date, I will pull out some of the plants, and put them somewhere else. That’s where the rain comes in! Moving any plant causes stress to the plant, and only rainy days have the right conditions for this sort of thing, because dryness and hot sun do not facilitate the process of adaptation that is required of any plant that has been moved. When a good rain is in the forecast, the stars have aligned for you, and you need to take advantage of the favourable conditions.

That having been said, even when you do everything right, no plant likes being moved, so it takes weeks for the plant to recover. While that might sound like a negative thing, it’s actually good because it stretches out the timing of your crops, so that everything doesn’t ripen at the same time. For instance, if you are planting greens, that might all start coming in at some point in June – that means that sometime in July you will have too many and be overwhelmed with too many of that plant. By contrast, If you move some of them, they will stall for a few weeks while they recover, and then they will start coming on strong just when the original plants start running out of energy and vitality. In this way, the timing of your harvest gets spaced out in a way that is easier to match to your diet.

You Can Beat the Heat

In the height of summer, rainy days give you a break from the heat, and this is a perfect opportunity to do anything that is strenuous that you’ve been putting off due to the oppressive heat.

Trellises

A listener asked the question of how to make easy, simple trellises, for beans, so here are a few things that I use depending on the situation. For all of the options below requiring twine, I use either jute or hemp (from the dollar store) these twines are cheap, biodegradable, and vine type plants seem to find it easy to grab onto them.