Cottage gardeners can teach us something about sustainable practice

by Sharon Parker
published August 4 '08

Traditional cottage gardeners didn't have sprinklers, or hoses, or running water, for all that, but they used the water they had to good effect. When a cottager finished with the washing, she'd haul the tub of dirty, greasy, soapy water out to the garden to dump it. Not only did the garden get watered, but it even benefited from the residue of fat and soap that came with the water.

The wise use of water goes beyond the amount you use or the time of day you sprinkle. It also means using it to best advantage to both hydrate and, in a way, innoculate your garden plants.

Organic gardeners often share recipes for homemade solutions to kill pests or discourage disease. These will inevitably include oil in water with a bit of dish soap to break the surface tension and emulsify the oil droplets; this combination can smother small critters, like cabbage worms, bean beetles, mites and aphids. And what does your dirty dishwater comprise? Exactly!

Similarly, solutions to cure or at least discourage mildew and bacterial diseases generally include baking soda to raise the pH because these diseases do not thrive in alkaline conditions. But old-fashioned soap was made from lye, which is highly alkaline, so again the cottagers had everything they needed right there in their washing water to keep their gardens healthy.

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You can do this too, if you can capture your used dishwater for the garden (even if not made from lye, soap tends to be alkaline), but remember one very big caution: do not put soapy water on plants when they are in the sun or soon will be, because it will burn the leaves. Too much concentration of dishwater residue may also be harmful, so dump it in a different spot each day. In fact, your best approach is to walk through and inspect your garden at least a couple times a week to identify problem areas, then target your dishwater-dumping strategicially.

If you find aphids, you might dip a rag or sponge in the soapy water and wipe them off with it. Of course, a blast with the hose works equally well to remove aphids, should you not have soapy water at hand. But don't assume one such dose will do the trick. It will likely take several tries to get rid of them.

This summer I noticed shriveled and tightly curled leaves on several of the young cotoneaster shrubs I had just planted as bare root stock (they were little more than twigs when I planted them); on closer inspection, I found aphids sucking the life out of the new growth the struggling little bushes were working so hard to put forth. I grabbed the hose and blasted away with a spray of water. It took several such sessions once or twice a week for a couple of weeks, but now the shrubs have lots of healthy new leaves and there are no more signs of aphids lurking about.

Now let's talk about water and mildew before we run out of room. You may already be aware that wet leaves are a breeding ground for mildew spores, especially if they are wet at night, because they'll stay that way till the morning sun dries them, and that's ample time for mildew to get a foothold. You can't do anything about rain at night, of course, or the dew, but you can avoid watering late in the evening.

That said, you can also use water to rinse off mildew spores and keep leaves healthy. Several years ago when I was out walking my dog in late summer, I noticed a woman sitting on her front stoop pointing the stream from her hose up into her lilac bushes. I recalled reading an article in Organic Gardening magazine about how rinsing leaves with water removed mildew spores. They recommended hosing down mildew-prone plants periodically, say once a week or so, to reduce the incidence of the disease. Sure enough, the woman told me, that's why she was spraying her lilacs, and, yes, she had found that it really helped prevent mildew. Timing is of the essence, of course: Make sure you allow time for the leaves to dry before dark.

Incidentally, all your garden plants could benefit from a late-afternoon shower on these hot days, just as you do. I know of two reasons for that. First, plants lose moisture through their leaves in what is called transpiration; when you spray them all with water, you cut down on transpiration and hence the amount of stress your plants are experiencing. Second, spider mites thrive in dry conditions, so hosing down your plants from time to time discourages those pests from ever settling in.
Cottagers practiced good garden housekeeping probably without realizing all the beneficial things they were doing; but what they did for their own reasons, we can adapt for ours. Of course, they also had the advantage of gardening in England, where the climate favors gardens, but there's only so much we can do to imitate them.