Importance Of Properly Watering Your Garden

I am going to apologize for doing this again, but it is critical to continue to have a discussion about ensuring our gardens receive the proper amount of water. Not too much and not too little. Despite my personal desires, and demands to the weather gods, it is clear that we just aren’t going to get a normal growing season when it comes to rain and temperature. It seems like we either get too much rain or not enough.

One Spring is dry and the next is wet. Yesterday was 101º and tomorrow is 70º!

The greatest challenge I find is many gardens I visit have irrigation systems in ‘set it and forget it’ mode.

If you want to have the healthiest garden, I encourage you to turn off your irrigation and get tuned into the weather and needs of your garden. Use your system when needed or you go on vacation. Too much water can be just as bad as a drought with causing disease, and many plants just don’t like lots of water.

Following are links to two previous posts I have done on watering. One is a general discussion that outlines a number of factors that influence moisture in the garden, and the other covers watering during a drought.

General discussion on watering

Watering during drought

I come back to this again because it is the one topic that I discuss with every client, and it is the one issue with which I have to reset most client’s understanding. I find it to be as much intuitive as scientific, and if you want a healthy garden, you need to tune into its needs.

What I often try to do is help clients envision the roots of the plant at which we are looking.  

• A 10′ tree that was installed two years ago, might have roots that are 3′ underground. We want to roots to stay deep and go deeper, so we need to make sure water gets more than 3′ down into the soil. Handwatering the tree for a few minutes or having the irrigation spray heads come on for 15 minutes will only get  the water 6″ down.  Roots will then come up for the water or the deep roots will die in a drought and stress or kill the tree.
• A healthy lawn in full sun should have roots that are 12″ deep. If the irrigation system comes on and your irrigation heads are the ones that rotate left and right, then it might take an hour to get moisture deep enough to encourage the roots to stay down rather than come up for moisture. Most people don’t run their system long enough and they create lawns that are reactive to drought and high temperatures.

These are just two examples, but the key to watering properly, if we don’t get enough rain, is to water longer and less often. These examples show why it is critical to have a properly installed irrigation system because the needs of shrubs and lawns are drastically different. When you water deeply, it will remain in the root zone for longer, because it won’t evaporate like water on the surface.  Watering every day or two is only encouraging roots of any plant to come to the surface, and much of that water will evaporate. Roots that are at the surface are searching for water and thereby becoming very sensitive and not drought tolerant. You are creating plants that are reliant upon regular water, and this leads to long term problems.

This season, we had a wet Spring and have had two deep soaking rain events in the past month that have removed drought concerns and provided ample moisture deep in the soil. We are off to a good start this season and have required almost no supplemental water until the past few days when we hit 101º yesterday. This has been a shock and required supplemental water with many plants.

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