How to look after your garden in a heatwave?

Now we have reached late summer, our asters are starting to bloom! This week we have the first of our homegrown pale blue Chinese asters but we have had to water them a bit to keep them happy in this hot, dry weather. 

If your garden is looking a bit sad at the moment, you are not alone! Our loamy plot is holding up, but our sandy-soil garden is bone dry, the lawn is brown and the hydrangeas are shrivelled up, but they should bounce back once rain returns. We continually adjust the garden so that it can flourish better whatever the weather. I am contemplating a drip hose for some of the shrubs out the front, but on the whole we do not water the plants so that they establish deep roots that will get them through these dry spells. The best thing we can do to help protect against droughts is to choose drought-tolerant plants and add plenty of mulch (such as wood chip, leaf mould, straw, manure and even cardboard) as this can improve the fertility of soil and also reduce water-loss during heatwaves.

Other homegrown British flowers this week include sedum, statis, gypsophila, abelia and lavender plus Lincolnshire sunflowers.