WHAT a year it has been for gardens and gardening. After a pretty dry spring and summer and a drought, as I write in September rains appear to have resumed.

I know that gardeners tend to always grumble about the weather whatever it is. Remember last year, after a fairly wet winter and spring, gardeners were complaining about slugs, snails and other pests and the lack of success with many vegetable crops.

This year, vegetables and fruit on our allotment have been bountiful with the warm weather. We have enjoyed lots of salad, strawberries, courgettes and French beans in particular.

We didn’t want to make strawberry jam. After making strawberry coulis and strawberry sorbet, we started to run out of ideas of what to do with all our fruit. Our neighbours have benefited from some of our surpluses.

We have learnt that in future years we may try to grow smaller quantities of some crops more successionally where we can. Some of our salad crops bolted before we could get to harvest them.

Watering has been challenging but we feel sure that our adoption of a “no dig” approach to gardening, particularly at our allotment, and our use of plenty of garden compost has reduced the pressure on regular watering. At home, we have two large water tanks holding the equivalent of 20 large water butts. They feed off our bungalow guttering. This is a very useful source of water but, over the dry summer, they quickly became dry too.

We have a lot of plant containers around our bungalow which we feel help to give an attractive display. They can be moved around as plants come into and go out of flower. However, they do need lots of watering, particularly when it is dry. So, a lot of work here and we may well need to rationalise the number.

Some plants have fared better than others. Many plants have flowered earlier although not everything. Established plants with deeper root systems appear to have been able to find some moisture even in drier conditions. We may have to reconsider growing some particular shrubs for the future because they really can’t take long periods of drought.

We are advised that these kinds of warm and dry summers are going to be more frequent in future. Before we all start to grow more exotic plants, we need to make sure that our soil is sufficiently free draining and that the plants will take our wetter winters.

The tree and shrub canopy we have in our back garden will, I think, increasingly provide welcome shadier conditions for plants and for us too in the years ahead.

I shall be continuing to add lots of compost to the soil and to mulch the soil with layers of green compost each year. The more organic matter of this kind that you can add to your soil, the more you will improve its water retaining ability.

We really do need to keep experimenting and learn to adapt as our climate continues to change.