Summer Rains Bring Drenched Plants - What Do You Do?

Is it summer or what? Hot and humid with evening thunder clouds all around (at least where I live). As much as the clouds were so threatening, it just wasn’t falling on my patch of ground for a while. At one point I went outside and started dancing. I figured, what do I have to lose? Even if it didn’t work, I was having a good time. I must say I did get about .10 of an inch after my little dance.

I don't know if it was my dance or what, but now we have had a deluge of rain, so much so that I can really tell which pots are not draining well because it's forming a mini pond in the pots - not good for the plants!

Finding the Right Balance for Your Plants

Too dry or too wet isn't good. Just like all things in life, we need a balance and that's what we are going for with the soil in our pots, something in between.

Things with smaller leaves or a large root system stress from drought the most. Then, at the point that I was getting this wonderful rain, many plants were staying too wet. I find this worse then being too dry because if I keep an eye on my plants when they are tending to be a bit dry and get to them in time when they show just a little stress, watering will revive them. If they are too wet for too long it drowns and kills the roots. So this means a lot of monitoring for dryness and wetness.

Steps to Save Overly Wet Plants

If the pots continue to be wet and appear to be declining the only way I’m been able to get out of this problem is to rework it by removing a good portion of the media that’s wet (usually there are not many good roots in this wet area) and replace it with dry media. Many times this wetness also causes algae growth on the surface, of course this needs to be removed and resurfaced.

I’m very excited to say that I reworked almost all my plants. Which means I’ve trimmed them back (preserving good stuff for using), removed the media surface and replace with new media.

I actually created a video of myself reworking my water-logged lavender plant. Check it out here:

Now it's time to find some recipes to use all of this good stuff in - yum 😋 (hands rubbing together with glee)!