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A lot of people seem to be taking watering a garden as a rather easy job. However, only some experts out there know that it actually isn’t. It can be quite challenging, especially if you haven’t got your basics right.
Why is it so important to water your plants carefully?
Furthermore, there seem to be two common groups of gardeners. The first group wouldn’t bother watering their plants until they get dry and start withering. The second one seems to be a rather overenthusiastic lot and may water their plants more than they could take.
In either case, the plants are going to suffer. They’ll probably grow weaker and not produce many vegetables or whatever you’re trying to grow. Hence, it seems quite important to understand how to water your plants properly in order to ensure a healthy growth of your plants.
This is probably another thing where a lot of gardeners make mistakes. They first probably try to find a specific watering technique, and then consider sticking to it throughout the year. However, this seems to be a wrong approach. Just as over-watering or inadequate watering, following a specific watering technique may lead to a poor growth of your plants.
After all, plants tend to have different watering requirements during different times, and hence sticking to a specific technique won’t yield very good results overall. The approach to watering a garden requires one to take into consideration several different factors, and hence it’s important to understand them before coming up with ideal watering techniques.
One of the basics of an ideal watering approach is probably to first identify the type of soil your plants are growing in. The same plants, when grown in different types of soil, seem to be having different watering requirements. Similarly, there also seem to be some particularly favorable type of soils for certain specific plants. Hence, probably the wise thing to do would be to grow such plants in their particularly favorable type of soils.
For instance, growing vegetables in sandy soils seem to be demanding watering twice a week and about half inch each time. On the other hand, if the same plants are being grown in clay or loam soil, they’d probably require to be watered just once a week and about 1 inch of water. Now though both the type of soil requires the same amount of water, the latter requires watering just once a week, which can obviously be a great thing for some gardeners, especially the busy ones.
Furthermore, there may be even soil requiring the different amount of water for growing the same type of plants. Hence, if one does a bit of research about the type of soil they’re growing their plants in, can probably get a good idea of the watering technique they need to go with.
Well, usually, the watering requirements need to be fulfilled by anyway, be it irrigation, rainfall, or any other ways. Hence, if it’s raining out there, the watering requirement would obviously be different. However, this may mean a bit of work on your part, as you may have to measure the amount of water your plants have received due to the rains. After all, only then you’ll be able to make out if your plants need more watering or not. Sticking to the same amount of watering even during rains may obviously lead to problems of over-watering again.
There are many other small factors like this one, which, to play their part in affecting the watering requirements of your plants. In short, the outside conditions seem to be having a major impact on the watering requirements of your plants, and hence need to be monitored closely.
One of such factors is sunlight. When the sun seems to be shining over your plants for most of the time of the day, they’re bound to dry out faster than usual. The same stands true for winds. If the winds are flowing strong, they’ll probably dry out the plants too. Hence, during such times, the watering requirement would be more than usual. How much more? Well, that actually depends on the outside conditions. You probably need to be a bit more active during such times and check when your plants start looking a bit dryer. That will probably be the ideal time to water them again.
Coming to some specific ways of watering your garden, we’re listing some of the most popular ways and how good or not-so-good they are.
Sprinkling: Many people seem to be using sprinklers for watering their plants. Now though this does seem to be a good option to go for when your plants have just started growing and are still quite small, they may not turn out to be a great option when watering larger plants. Instead, soaker hoses or going for a drip irrigation system may do better.
Hoses: Frankly speaking, there seem to be quite a bit of argument over how effective hoses are as a way of watering gardens. Now though they may not be the best way of watering overall, they seem good enough for watering containers as well as large plants like tomatoes.
Also, they probably turn out to be more effective when used along with a basin.
Drip irrigation: This seems to be one of the better ways of watering large gardens. There are many different types of drip irrigation systems available.
They’re aimed at watering your plants rather slowly, by letting out water through the emitter or holes the pipes used in the system come with. As mentioned above, there are many options one can go for, including those coming with a single pipe to those with a series of them. They’re obviously connected to a source of water and seem to be watering the root area of the plants properly, something that can be very beneficial.
However, one of the disappointing things associated with them is the rather considerably high price. They cost significantly more than their other counterparts. They seem to be a good option for those with very little time for watering the garden or living in areas where there is a restricted water supply.
The best time to water a garden seems to be early morning when it’s still quite cool out there. Watering in the morning allows the water to get to the plants’ roots. Watering in the morning also means that the plants will be able to deal better with the heat of the sun throughout the day.
However, if you can’t water your garden in the early morning, late afternoon or early evening seems to be the second best time. They’ll still probably be able to get rid of the dryness they would have to deal with before you water them.
