Garden Irrigation Ideas

From soil types to rainwater harvesting to watering hardware, your crops will have special watering needs.

By Barbara Pleasant
Updated on July 3, 2023
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by Adobestock/Photozi

Keep crops healthy, know how much to water plants, and maintain an abundant bounty with wise garden irrigation ideas and organic mulching.

In a perfect growing season, 1 inch of gentle rain falls each week. Gardeners dream of such a season, but plants know better than to expect perfect weather. In response to dry conditions, they close their stomata (the thousands of “breathing” pores located on both sides of the leaves) to limit moisture loss, and send roots deeper in search of water. Roots change their growth pattern to accommodate wet conditions, too, often staying close to the surface where they have better access to oxygen.

These are admirable talents, but few plants are water-handling acrobats. Compared to your area’s native plants, most food-garden plants are amateurs at adapting to your local rainfall patterns, so they need help. Do you know how much to water plants? Delivering water wisely means minimizing wasted water and wasted time. In more practical terms, it means anticipating your garden’s needs and setting priorities, having a conservation-based watering system in place, preserving water through mulching, and finding innovative ways to work out the kinks in your garden’s water supply.

Newly planted seeds, transplants of any kind, and plants grown in containers almost always need supplemental water. Plan ahead to provide water in these situations, which can usually be done with hoses and watering cans. To help maintain continuous surface moisture in newly seeded beds, cover them with burlap blankets or thrift-store curtains on sunny days until the seeds start to sprout. Use upturned flowerpots or other shade covers to make sure the soil around newly planted seedlings stays moist, and to reduce overall transplanting trauma. Remove the covers after a few days.

The next-priority plants are crops that can suffer permanent damage due to inconsistent soil moisture. Lettuce and other salad crops lose their flavor when the soil gets warm and dry, and tomatoes often split when dry conditions give way to a soaking rain. Mulches are the easiest way to avoid fluctuating soil-moisture levels when growing these and other sensitive plants. Biodegradable mulches (leaves, compost, clean grass clippings, etc.) block surface evaporation while suppressing weeds and making important contributions to the soil’s supply of organic matter. You can even double-mulch by covering a sheet-type mulch of newspaper or cardboard with grass clippings or another biodegradable mulch.

Consider the following garden irrigation ideas, and see if they’d be effective solutions for your garden.

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