Coping With A Drought: Pump Is Pumping, Who's Doing What On The Field, (Another) Strimming Mishap

Hello, it's Tuesday 21 July 2026.

Another week and still no rain. I'm thanking my lucky stars that I bought my submersible pump last week: it's brilliant and making life much easier. The forecast is not looking good for rain in the next couple of weeks either. I hope you're coping ok with your flowers: I'd really love to hear how you're getting on and if you have any tips or advice to share.

Tonight I'm giving a rundown of how all the plants are coping with the conditions, including those flourishing, those not loving it, the ones which have just frozen in horror, and the surprises (hello, Panicum). If you're wondering whether or not your plants are doing what they're supposed to be doing, you might be able to resonate with the stories of what mine are doing.

I've got another long list of things to be done this week: let's see how many I get through. I'll report back on Fridays' episode!

Longleat Safari Park UK Free Child Ticket Discount Code: ROAR26. Valid for visits during July 2026.

Please come back and join me for the next episode - you're always very welcome!

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If you like what you hear, please follow/subscribe to this podcast so that you're the first to hear new episodes when they become available every Tuesday and Friday. And if you enjoy this episode, please take a minute to leave a review because it really does help more cut flower-lovers just like you to find the podcast. 

Follow me on instagram @henhillcutflowers for a behind-the-scenes look at life on my cut flower plot. And you can find my website at www.henhillcutflowers.co.uk and my email is lydia@henhillcutflowers.co.uk.

Join me on my journey through a year of growing and selling cut flowers in England. I'm giving you the low-down on what it's really like, how I'm getting started, what you do and don't need, what I do when and why, the successes and failures, and just about everything in between. All in real time. With guest appearances from my chickens every now and then. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Hi, welcome to my podcast, Becoming a Cut Flower Grower. I'm your host, Lydia, and I'm here to share my year of growing and selling cut flowers. I'll be giving you the lowdown on everything I'm doing and sharing all the highs and lows, the good times and the inevitable disasters, all in real time. Join me on my cut flower journey starting right now. Hello and welcome to the latest episode. It is Tuesday, the 21st of July 2026, and I hope you are well. It is still very hot here in the UK. Not technically a heat wave anymore. Apparently it's got to be over 30 degrees for that, but it is still incredibly hot, and everything is just absolutely baking. So at this point, it's not really the fact that we haven't had any rain for what feels like a decade, but obviously that is an issue. It's literally just the cumulative effect of all of this sunshine on the plants, and some of them are looking well, everything on the field is looking fine, I have to say. Some in my clients' gardens are looking absolutely burnt to a crisp, and some in my garden are not looking very happy either. So I um I had put I put a new tap splitter on my tap and my outside tap, and I took the old fitting away and put it somewhere. And this only happened about three days ago, and I cannot find it anywhere. So I have not been able to water my garden properly, and it's really starting to suffer. So I'm gonna have to go back and have another go tonight. I honestly, my house is so small, my garden's tiny, I don't know where I could possibly have lost it, but I have. So I'm getting through a lot more water than I would normally do. I had the most incredible diplomatic incident with my other half on the field. You won't believe we've had another strimming disaster, and I know you'll be thinking, how is that even possible? But it is possible, and he has managed to strim down my one and only very special Amaranthus this year, and it was growing right on the edge of the concrete, so outside of the feed room where Kylie's room is, like the aka the studio. Um, and if you don't know who Kylie is, she's one of my best girls who sadly passed away last year. Um, anyway, the studio is named after her, and I've got a table outside, and I do bits of arranging and I mess about with things, and it's where I cut things and do deadheading and potter about and do my own little thing. And I throw all the cuttings onto the floor, and then when I've got a decent pile, I pick them all up, go and compost them, and then I use a broom to sweep everything off the edge of the concrete onto the grass. And last year I grew quite a bit of amaranthus and it didn't sell very well at all. So this year I decided not to do any. Uh, and I was really excited a couple of weeks ago to see this beautiful amaranthus popping up in a crack in the concrete, where clearly I'd messed about with them last year doing some arrangements, and the seeds had fallen on the floor, and I'd swept them down into this crack in the concrete, and one had germinated, and I was beyond excited about it. I have been watering it and cultivating it and looking after it for weeks, and it was about a foot tall, and it's the only thing that is actually growing up here because I tend to pull all of the weeds out. Anyway, I came up the other day, and my other half had very kindly offered to strim for me, which was amazing, and I'm very grateful because he's so so helpful. And I came up and amidst the sea of devastation, when anybody's been strimming, was my Agapanth um, not Agapanthus, uh Amaranthus, um, sheared off and spread all over the place. And um, you'll be pleased to hear that my other half is still alive, although these strimming incidents are getting a little bit stressful. And I did make the point to him that he actually grows amaranthus at home, so he does technically know what they look like, and um he just yeah, anyway. So there was a little bit of an incident about that, but I'm very pleased to say that my one plant is now actually shooting again. So if it has enough time, I suppose I may get something by the end of the year because the cephalaria did recover. Um, but yes, just one of those um diplomatic incidents that I would rather avoid. So I've got a pump update for you, very, very exciting. I hope you enjoyed the last episode where I yakked on for nearly nearly 30 minutes about this pump and the system that I've got going because it is just amazing, it's literally changed my life. It's working very, very well. The battery's lasting exactly as advertised, so about 40 minutes. So I have about two days worth of watering on one charge, and then I take it home and charge it up, and it's fully charged in about an hour. So I've now got three separate hoses coming off the pump. Uh, one goes along to the roses, one runs along to the sweet peas uh and the old perennial beds, and then one runs down to the zinnias, and that does everything along bed four. So it's working extremely well. The only thing I have to do, obviously, is there's only one output from the pump. So when I finish watering one area, I need to turn the pump off, switch the hoses over, and attach the next uh hose I want to use. But that's a minor detail and it's working really, really well, saving absolutely masses of time, so easy to use, and no winding in of the hoses because I'm leaving them laid out on the ground exactly where I want to start watering them. And the spray guns I bought, which I didn't realise at the time, they're not the ones where you have to hold like a trigger down or anything, they've got like this um sliding plastic bit that you just kind of slide forward, it's like kind of a horseshoe shape on the top of the gun, and you just slide it forward or slide it back to turn it off. So that makes watering very easy. There's nothing that you have to hold um in your wrist while you're doing it. I can't recommend the system highly enough, it's amazing. I wish I'd done it sooner. Now, I would be interested to know how you are getting on on your field. I know it's a really, really tough time for growers absolutely everywhere, especially here in the UK with this weather we've been having. And I would love you to get in touch with me, even if you just send me one word to sum up how your summer is going, whether you are a new grower or an ex um a novice grower, or it's like your first or second year, like me, second year. Um just to let me know how you're getting on, really, because I know I know, especially if you're a novice like me, with all of this, it is hard enough to do all of this without all of the challenges of the watering, and then I thought I'd got better at second guessing when flowers would actually be ready to be cut for an event at some point in the future. This weather makes it even more challenging because you just can't, it's just really hard to predict with the conditions at the moment. We've also had some very windy days as well, which is also not great because it dries everything out, and so things are either just going over very quickly or they're just shorter than I'm expecting them to be, which is not the end of the world, they are still saleable, but they obviously don't command the same price as if they were longer. So I'd be really, really interested to know how you are getting on and how you're feeling about it all. So please don't hesitate to get in touch. Now, on the field, I thought I'll give you a run-through of everything that is going on on the field. As I say, everything is fine because I imported these 2,000 litres of water, and so everything is getting a really nice soaking in the evening. I feel I don't want to sound like winter is coming, I don't want to tempt fate, um, but obviously we are one month on from the longest day, and I can definitely notice the difference with the nights drawing in. So it's 5 to 9 in the evening at the moment, and the sun has completely gone, is definitely cooling down, and you can just start to feel it. I mean, I'm I'm here every evening, obviously, to put the chickens to bed and um watching them. I know that I can see that they're going to bed earlier. Now, the Rude Becca are absolutely huge this year. These guys have caught me slightly by surprise, and I've had to retro stake them, and it's taken me right back to 2025 when I ended up retro-staking a lot of things because I wasn't on the ball, didn't realise the importance of staking, and didn't realise you have to do it so far in advance. So I've bodged something with them and they're doing fine, they are just absolutely enormous, but they don't seem to have any issues whatsoever. They're they're quite extraordinary. They've got some uh different Rubekias next to them who have come up much shorter. So my original guys, and I'm sorry I don't know the varieties here because I bought them from another grower and I didn't um make a note of what variety they were. But the second lot, which are also perennial ones, have come up quite short this year, which is a shame because they're very, very pretty and they've got a slightly smaller head on them, they're a little bit more refined, whereas the the big ones are just like absolute showstoppers. The helleniums are also a bit short this year. I'm not sure quite what's happened to them. They did get moved from the old perennial bed to the new perennial bed, and I think they have found the soil a little bit difficult to get a hold on. They've gone down the area where Nigel lifted the turf for me, and it is a much more challenging area down there. Some things don't seem to uh give a jot whatsoever, and then other things have just not enjoyed the experience. So I will have quite a lot of work to do over the winter to get the soil improved. The hydrangeas are also something that have not enjoyed being down the end of the um where Nigel lifted the turf for me. So they were plants that uh well, one of them, Hydranger Limelight, was actually a plant that I left in its pot on a drip tray all of 2025, cut repeatedly from it. The blooms were enormous, it was absolutely showstopping. And I thought, well, this is a piece of cake, I'll just go and buy a shed load of these and it'll be fine. So that's what I did. Put them down on bed three, and they're super unhappy, so they are not not thanking me at all. The cuttable stems are about 30 to 40 centimetres tall, which is hopeless. I've sold them, they're going to a wedding for bud vases, but nowhere near what they were supposed to be like. So that again is a soil issue. Um, they obviously have not had as much watering as they would have done if they were sitting in a drip tray. And I've got another Hydranger which is in a drip tray, which is doing perfectly fine. So it's kind of a combination of lack of water and also the soil not being good enough for them. The scabius, on the other hand, absolutely love the soil. They're down there in the same area and they are doing absolutely fine. They're they're troopers. I'm gonna go really big on scabius next year. I've been looking at the field in a really, really critical way at the moment. Now, it could be that I'll be tempting fate and we'll have a non-stop washout summer next year. I think the scabius would probably still be fine, but they seem to really love it here, and maybe that's because they're like field scabius and they actually happen to like being in a field, I don't know. But they are going great guns. The only disappointing thing is that I bought a packet this year called Fondant Fancies, which were a mixture of all these beautiful pastel shades from pale pinks to darker pinks to sort of apricots and all these wonderful shades. Well, 90% of them are white, which is very disappointing because when I showed my wedding event florist what I'd bought, she was quite interested in those. She thought they'd be lovely, and they will be lovely, but they are just not in the colours that I was expecting them to be, which is very disappointing, and um but just one of those things who can't do anything about it now. The dahlias are flowering, not all of them, just some of them. I mean, some of them started off into growth much earlier, and I've just let them all do their thing. I haven't panicked about them, nobody's been fed either. Got some very nice, very nice, sort of quite stocky looking plants this year. They're not as big as they were last year, which doesn't surprise me. They didn't get an awful lot of water. I mean, we had a very, very wet spring, like an incredibly wet spring, and I was very worried that they were actually just gonna rot in the ground, even though I'm on a slope and it doesn't normally cause me problems. Hang on just one second because Danny is busy ferreting about under one of the roses. Danny, get out of there! Get out of there, out. Oh, they're so naughty. Anything that's got bark down, they want to just completely trash it. So, the dahlias, they're doing absolutely fine. No concerns there whatsoever, and they are now having plenty of water with the pump system, so that is fine. The sweet peas are all going to seed, not surprisingly, it is definitely, definitely too hot for them, and I am just letting them go. I don't want to faff about deadheading them now. I'm just gonna collect as much seed as possible, certainly of the King's Ransom, so I don't have to buy any more because they were expensive. Likewise with the Orlaya, that's also all going to seed, and I'm also just letting that go at this point as well. And hopefully, I will have lots of early flowering big plants next year. Having seen what the self-seeded ones did this spring, I'm pretty excited to just let these guys go to seed. Now the salvias are also doing fine. Um, I cut them quite hard to sell the stems, and they are now re-sprouting, which is great. They are in front of the sweet peas, and like the zinnias last year, I'm not sure there's something really odd about this particular area. So they've got a bit of powdery mildew on them. It's clearly a bit of a kill zone, I think, where they're planted. So I'll see if I can get them sorted because otherwise I'm just wasting a complete bed, or I'm just gonna have to find something that does not succumb to powdery mildew and move the salvias. The echinacea are absolutely terrific, they are just predictably fabulous, they're incredibly tall, they've had no TLC whatsoever, and they are flowering absolutely beautifully, so I'm just in love with those guys, and also completely bomb-proof is the Dianthus, which, as you know, I'm a huge fan of Dianthus. They are flowering beautifully. Nobody seems to want them, but I cut them for myself, they last about two years in the vase, and they are no, they don't, uh, but they are absolutely stunning. Now, the Crospedia, these are my little yellow golf balls on sticks, absolute stars of the show in 2025, along with Didiscus, which none of mine germinated this year, so that was a disaster. But the Craspedia are frozen in time, they have not put on any growth whatsoever. They still look exactly like they did two months ago, so I think something's gone horribly wrong with their root system. Um, I might just dig one up and see what's happened because I'm a bit surprised about those guys. The Pfizer Stegia, now these were new perennials that I bought as tiny plugs in about November last year. They are absolutely adorable, and I bought a purple one. Well, they were supposed to be pink, but they're actually purple, and then a white one. The purple ones are about two foot tall, which is great. The white ones are all about one foot tall, which is not so great. So the white ones can go in bud vases and tiny little things, and then the purpley ones, which should be pink, can be cut and go for normal arrangements. Very, very nice little plants, those. I'm really pleased. I'm gonna get a lot more of those. They're lovely. Some of the foxgloves are flowering again. These um they're the sort of apricots, like the Sutton's apricot. Um, again, terribly, terribly short stems, but nice of them to make an appearance. The Panic and Frosted Explosion have literally exploded. So I've been watching them as they've been getting sort of a bit bigger and just thinking how amazing they are, and then I looked at them tonight and they've just sort of completely exploded. So I think they'd still look fine in an arrangement, but I didn't realise they were gonna get quite so explody all over the place. The cephalaria, which is the giant scabius, the yellow one that 40% of that also got strimmed in a strimming incident as well. That is taking a break. Now I was under the impression that they were gonna flower fairly regularly all summer, but I think they've just kind of blown their socks off in the early part of the year. So they are on a bit of a break at the moment, which is fine. All the yellow sunflowers out. So these are the pro-cut sunflowers that I've been experimenting with this year, the first time growing them. The ones where Nigel lifted the turf struggling, not happy with the soil. The ones that are in my vegetable patch are doing incredibly well, they look phenomenal. So I can't wait to see what they look like if I put them in the right area. Interestingly, that only the yellow ones have come out yet. So I should have red ones and also peach ones. So I'm waiting for those guys. The roses are all on a break as well. They've decided to stop flowering and just put on vegetative growth, so they're all growing like mad, which is amazing. And I've been waiting for them to do that since I put them in the ground last year. So that's good to see. The relay planting. Now, this is down in bed three. So I talked about this a few weeks ago where I've adopted this new technique of putting little tiny transplant seedlings amongst existing annuals, and then when the existing annuals are finished, I'm just going to cut them off at soil level. I'm not going to pull the roots up and disturb the root system. I've just planted my new transplants in amongst them, and they are doing fine. So I've got the um oh, what's it called? Uh, the Astor, Flamingo at Sunset. There's a whole load of those guys have gone in, and the gomfrina have gone in. Now I didn't manage to germinate very many of those, but the ones I have done have gone in, and they've decided to flower, which is a bit odd because they're only about five centimetres tall. So they've just obviously decided no, this is not for us. We're just going to flower, set seed, and die, and that's it. So I'm just leaving them because I don't have very many and I haven't got the heart to pull them out. I've waited like such a long time for them that I really want to see what they look like, even if they are just in miniature. It's very odd, but the snaps are all fabulous, they're really amazing. I'm hoping that they're gonna go off to an event next week. Um, I always have this massive wobble with snaps. Every year I have it, and they like keep me on the edge of my uh what's the expression, edge of my toes? On my toes, on my toes, on the edge of my seat, that's it. Um both of those things. They do that for ages, and then all of a sudden they flower, and I'm like, oh thank goodness I can grow snaps after all. So that's amazing. The cornflowers that I sowed myself this spring are lovely but short, again, a bit disappointing, not in the same league as the ones that self-seeded last year. So obviously, we're adding cornflowers to the list of things that need to be sown in the autumn. The cosmos are flowering, uh, the Daucas are absolutely fabulous. I haven't sold any of these yet, and there is still time. But the beautiful thing about the Daucas is they just keep changing, and then of course, when the flowers are finished and the seeds seed head, you get this seed head, and it kind of closes itself up and makes like this sort of spider's web of stuff that they're absolutely stunning. I'm I'm really enjoying just watching what they do. The status are lovely. These are plants I bought from another grower, so I didn't know. Sorry, I didn't buy them, I was given them from another grower. I didn't know what they're gonna be like. They're shades of purple, so I've got some that are very, very dark, almost black, black, but not black, and then some sort of purpley mauve ones, and they're very, very lovely. And I always think as a backup, if I don't have any luck selling those, I can. Dry them and then I get another hit. The Astaflamingo at sunset are poised to do something, but as I've never grown them before, I'm not exactly sure what they're doing. They seem to be budding up, but I'm just gonna wait and see. Um, I'm very, very excited about them, but I'm trying not to tell them that so that they don't mess it up at the last minute. And the zinnias are probably gonna flower in about a week or so, I think, if everything stays pretty much exactly the same. They've all been pinched and they're all branching out now, which is fine, and I can see some flower heads coming on there. So that's everything that's going on up at the field. I've got quite a long list of things that I want to get done the rest of the week. Uh, we'll see how many I actually get through before I speak to you again on Friday. But as part of my marketing initiative, I have a local caterer coming to visit on Thursday, which is very exciting. So I'm looking forward to giving her a tour of the field, and I'm hoping she's gonna see something that she likes and that she will consider buying from me in the future. That would be amazing. Um, I'm seeing my daily mentor Richard Bailey on Friday. I'm gonna go and have a tour of his allotment and see exactly what's going on with him. He's quite worried at the moment because we've got a hose pipe ban coming in this week for my area. Um, I live well, Weatherfield is is actually on the corner of three different counties in the UK. So we get hose pipe bans normally, and depending on who supplies your water at different times. So the bands tend can tend to come in in stages. So we've got one for this area coming in on later this week at some point. So that is gonna be very concerning, especially for people like Richard trying to keep his dahlias going in this weather, and of course, he's got major exhibitions and shows happening in a couple of months, so it's so important for him to be able to keep his flowers in great condition. And I'm gonna be sorting through my seeds. So I mentioned a week or so ago that I just ordered some seeds to have a go at sowing my own perennials. I'm gonna be brave and give that a go. Um, I'm just gonna get all the seed packets sorted out, and then I'm not not not not going to buy any more until I've actually sat down and made a list of what I'm doing next year. Because as you can see from that list that I just read out of all the things I'm growing, there's a lot of things there, and I I'm absolutely determined to refine that list so that I'm not growing. I think I've set myself a limit of five annuals, and you know I set that limit for myself this year and then blasted through it and did about 19. But honestly, I think this is really not the field for doing lots and lots of annuals, it's very much a shrubs and perennials field, and the annuals really just need to be the icing on the cake, and there need to be no more than five varieties, and that is absolutely it. And then I need to do those in a really, really high volume, very, very closely planted together, and then just get them gone and off the field. So that is the pledge that I'm setting myself. I also need to do some mulching this week. One of the reasons I've been holding off doing it is because it's always better to mulch when the soil is really really wet, so you're kind of trapping the moisture in under a mulch. But clearly, if we're not going to have any rain for weeks, I need to just forget about that and just get some mulch on the ground so really that it acts more of a sunscreen than actually keeping the moisture in, although it will do that as well. But it's really at this point protecting the beds that I have not got round to mulching. So I've got some great big piles of leaf mould which I emptied out of their uh palette containers so that I have better access to the vegetable garden. And then when the chickens come out, they've been sorting through it and they've kind of ripped it into tiny, tiny pieces. So I'm gonna put lots and lots of um shredded, very finely shredded leaves down. Now they are completely bone dry, so it's not about them being moist or anything, and it's not even about improving the soil quality at this point, it's just literally about having a barrier between the soil and the sunshine, and that is, I think, going to be a really important job to do this week. And I'm also gonna be trying to sow some more vegetable seed because it is not too late to do that. We'll see. This might be a bit too much of an optimistic list. I also need to make uh some more anti-midge oil. So we have a real problem up on the field with midges in the evening. It's not so bad with the mosquitoes, it's the little tiny midgy things that I can't even see with my eyesight these days, but they are quite bitey. In fact, all the insects seem to be quite bitey and upset at the moment. So I make up this oil. My mum gave me this fantastic recipe for it, and there's some kind of carrier oil, which um I'm gonna have to phone her and ask her um for the recipe again, with a citronella essential oil dropped in, and just a few drops of that on ankles, knees, and elbows and wrists does a really good job of keeping these guys away because it's very, very irritating, and um, I just don't want any bites. Now, one more thing to tell you I went to Longleat Safari Park with a friend of mine today for a day out, and I have to tell you that Longleat are doing free child places until the end of July 2026. So I have a code, I will put it in the show notes. If you have time, then um I highly recommend a visit. It was really, really great today, although everything was very tired and not moving apart from the wolves which were actually wandering around, which was amazing. Um, so I do highly recommend that. As I say, I'll put the code in the show notes. If you've got time and you've got the budget for it, then it's a it's a probably an offer worth taking advantage of. So that's me. I'm gonna sign off now. I'll be back on Friday. I hope you have a wonderful rest of the week. And if you have time and the inclination, I would love to hear how you're getting on. You can send me an email. My web my website is in the show notes and my email addresses. You can drop me a DM on Instagram, um, and I would love to hear how you are coping with all of this. I hope it's good, but you know, feel free to tell me what you really think. Um, so there we go. Have a great rest of the week and uh come back on Friday, please, for the latest episode because you're always very welcome. All the best.