Too wet to dig? Rainy-day pastimes for gardeners

When it's too wet to work outside, the most useful thing a gardener can do is stay in: plan next season, mark up a seed catalogue, or settle down with a crossword or a game. There will be plenty of chances. The Met Office's averages for 1991 to 2020 show that the UK gets at least 1mm of rain on about 159 days a year, including about 16 days in November.

Why staying in helps the garden

Keeping off the garden in wet weather protects the soil. The RHS warns that clay soils "lose their structure, and become puddled and compacted" if they are worked or walked on when wet, and that putting this right is "slow and laborious". Once winter rains have soaked them, it adds, clay soils often can't be worked or walked on until mid-spring. Lawns suffer too: walking on a waterlogged lawn makes the damage worse, so the RHS advises keeping off.

Plan next season

A wet afternoon is the time to decide where everything will grow next year. The RHS suggests planning your crop rotation before the growing season, when you order seed, and moving each group of vegetables to a different part of the plot each year. This helps to reduce the build-up of pests and diseases that attack particular plant families. Its groups are brassicas, legumes, onions, the potato family and roots, rotated over three or four years. A sketch of the plot, with notes on what thrived and what struggled this year, will make next spring's choices easier.

The seed catalogue habit

The firms behind the catalogues go back a long way. Suttons was founded in Reading in 1806 by John Sutton, and began supplying seeds to the royal household in 1858, at Queen Victoria's request. Thompson & Morgan traces its roots to 1855 and a small garden behind a baker's shop in Ipswich, where William Thompson grew rare and unusual plants from seeds sent from all over the world. Suttons' historic archive is now kept at the Museum of English Rural Life in Reading. Reading a catalogue with a pen in hand and the crop plan beside it is the gardener's version of window shopping, and the wish list can be trimmed later.

Crosswords and word puzzles

For a change from plant names, there is the crossword. The modern crossword is usually traced to Arthur Wynne, a Liverpool-born journalist whose "word-cross" puzzle appeared in the New York World on 21 December 1913; the name was later swapped round to "cross-word". Britain's first, according to The Oxford Guide to Word Games, appeared in Pearson's Magazine in February 1922, and The Times published its Crossword No. 1 on 1 February 1930. A quick crossword or a word search fits neatly between showers, while a cryptic crossword can fill the rest of the afternoon.

Bingo-style games and Slingo

Bingo-style games suit a wet afternoon too. British bingo uses 90 numbers, and each ticket carries 15 of them across three rows, ready for the caller's "Eyes down". Slingo, a cross between slots and bingo, was dreamed up in the mid-1990s by Sal Falciglia Sr., a businessman from Ridgewood, New Jersey, and launched to the public on AOL in 1996. Its name joins the two games, and so does its design: a five-by-five grid of numbers sits above a row of five slot reels, numbers the reels turn up are marked off the grid, and a line of five scores a "Slingo".

Slingo is also played for money at UK online casinos: Fortune Games, for one, lists dozens of Slingo games in its lobby. They are for adults aged 18 and over only, and the results come from a random number generator, so no strategy changes the odds.

When the rain stops

When the rain eases, there's an evening job waiting. Slugs feed at night and are well suited to the UK's damp, mild climate, and the RHS suggests torchlight searches on mild evenings, especially when the weather is damp, moving any you collect to another part of the garden, such as the compost heap. Then it's back to the plan, the catalogue and the crossword until the next dry spell.

18+ only. Treat any game as paid entertainment, never a way to make money. Free, confidential help 24/7: National Gambling Helpline, 0808 8020 133.