I'd been dragging a hose around my Bristol garden every evening out of pure habit, right up until I noticed rain was scheduled for most of the nights I was bothering to water.
I want to admit something slightly embarrassing: for most of last summer, I watered my Bristol garden every single evening on a schedule that had nothing to do with the actual weather and everything to do with muscle memory. Hose out, water the tomatoes, water the beans, coil the hose back up, repeat. It never once occurred to me to check whether it was going to rain overnight anyway.
What changed it was, honestly, laziness — I was tired one evening and thought I’d check the forecast to see if I could skip it guilt-free. The hourly rain probability for that night sat at 80%, with a decent amount of accumulation expected between 11pm and 3am. I skipped the watering. It rained, properly, overnight. The garden did not notice the difference between my hose and the sky, which in hindsight is an obvious thing to say out loud but had somehow never occurred to me before.
I started actually checking before every watering session after that, and the number of evenings I could skip entirely was, frankly, a bit humbling — close to a third of my “watering days” turned out to be nights it was going to rain anyway, meaning I’d spent an entire previous summer doing unnecessary manual labour and, worse, probably overwatering a garden that didn’t need it.
My allotment neighbour, who I told all of this to with slightly more enthusiasm than the topic probably deserved, has started doing the same thing and now texts me smugly on nights she’s “allowed” to skip watering, as though we’ve discovered some kind of secret. We have not. It was in the forecast the whole time.
If you’ve got a fellow gardener who’s still hauling a hose around out of pure habit every evening, do them a favour and mention this — checking the overnight rain chance before you water is about the smallest change that’s ever saved me real time, and my tomatoes have, if anything, done better for it. If you’re also tracking frost dates and the rest of your growing season, that’s worth a read too.