Get wise to water - Kitchen Garden

‘One house won’t make a huge difference, but a street of houses will.

It’s all about it being a community effort,’ says the RHS, which is calling on the nation to adapt its gardening practices in response to Britain’s increasingly wet summers.

Gardens can play a massive role in reducing the risk of flooding, says RHS Chief Horticulturalist Guy Barter. “Rainwater needs somewhere to go, so if it’s not soaked up or captured in some way, it’ll usually flow into street drains which can’t always cope with the thousands of extra litres in a storm.”

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A garden demonstrating how we can use water run-off to create wildlife-friendly water features in our gardens was awarded Best Show Garden at July’s Hampton Court Palace Flower Show. The WWT Working Wetland Garden showed how water collected from a roof can be directed into a cascading water feature, where soil and plants slow down the water flow before it ends up in a wildlife pond.

Find out more and read Guy Barter’s 12 flood control tips at http://goo.gl/DdySa7

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Steve Ott

Steve Ott is editor of Kitchen Garden magazine and started his career as a professional grower, producing everything from cut flowers to vegetables. He has been growing fruit and veg all his life and spends most of his spare time in his garden in the East Midlands. He loves to experiment with crops and varieties he has never grown before and when he isn’t gardening is to be found out in the countryside bird watching and walking his dog Ted.