Garden Know-How: Wise Watering
(Page 3 of 3)
June/July 2007
By Barbara Pleasant
If your house has gutters and is located slightly higher than your garden, you may be able to connect the downspouts to a temporary plastic pipeline to distribute the roof runoff directly into your garden. If you have experience with this technique, please share what you’ve learned by posting in the comments section below.
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Use Water-smart Hardware
Good watering hardware can save hours of time — and hundreds of gallons of water — in the course of a growing season.
- Replace washers as needed to make sure hoses and faucets connect tightly.
- Outfit your outdoor faucets with splitters (shown in Image Gallery) so you can attach two hoses to each one.
- When using a sprinkler, soaker or drip system, use a timer so you won’t have to remember to turn the water off.
- Buy high-quality hoses that are not prone to kinking. If you keep numerous containers on your deck or patio, consider getting a springy coil hose that can be stashed in a corner between uses.
- Keep a supply of couplers on hand to repair cracks and leaks in hoses, or to splice together pieces of soaker hose.
Build Permanent Beds & Paths
Every garden will benefit by using permanent beds and paths, rather than tilling the entire garden every year. Using permanent beds allows you to concentrate water and fertilizers where they are needed and keep paths dryer and mulched to prevent weeds. Perhaps most importantly, by never walking on the beds you avoid compacting the soil. Use dense planting in the beds as a hedge against water loss in dry weather — when a good cover of leaves shades the soil, surface evaporation is cut by more than half.
If you live in a climate with high rainfall or dense clay soil, use raised beds to improve soil drainage. Drainage is critical for most food crops, because roots in waterlogged soil are deprived of the oxygen they require. Raised beds also allow soil to warm up earlier in spring.
But if you live where rain seldom falls, you should make sunken beds, rather than raised ones. This thousand-year-old Zuni Indian method is sometimes known as waffle gardening. By planting in slightly recessed beds, when rain does fall, it will flow toward the plants’ roots. Between rains, young plants will be protected from drying winds.
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