Do you have trees on your street? If we suffer a drought or even if the tree is just young, watering them could save it from a parched death.
Advice from the experts is to give them 50 litres a week, which is 5 average-sized watering cans worth and approximately a quarter of a normal water butt. Admittedly, that’s a lot. While it should only cost about 12 1/2 pence from Thames Water if you get it from the tap, it’s still a lot of work lugging 50kgs of water to your lucky but thankful tree, so give it what you can rather than nothing at all.
The problem for newly planted trees is that they have a small root ball, so they can’t reach down far into the ground.
Established trees can withstand a month of drought, but start showing signs of drought stress after that. Symptoms include:
- wilting or curled leaves
- yellowing leaves
- leaf scorch around edges
- pest infestations
- less leaves than normal
- leaf and branch die-back
Check out Trees for Cities
Also Trees for Streets where you can find information on the watering champions app, which will notify you of local trees which need watering.
