New plants benefit from watering often enough to keep the soil barely moist during their first season in the ground, because they are growing on skimpy roots. After a few weeks or months, depending on the growth rate of the plants, you can water less frequently. Plants with mature, extensive root systems usually do a good job of finding the water they need deep within the soil. And plants that are mulched during the growing season need minimal supplemental water, because the mulch shades the soil, keeping it cool and reducing evaporation of moisture just below the soil's surface.
Whether you are watering young plants or established ones, it's important that the water you provide soaks deeply into the soil. When only the top few inches are dampened, roots will gravitate toward the soil's surface, and plants with extensive surface roots dry out more quickly during droughts than those with deep, water-seeking roots. For this reason, providing a small trickle of water over several hours is usually better for plants than watering them with a strong shower for a few minutes.
But you need not spend hours watering your plants. Most garden centers and discount stores sell soaker hoses, which are inexpensive, perforated hoses with tiny holes so that they slowly drip water along the length of the hose into the soil. You can snake soaker hoses between your plants and disguise them by covering them with mulch. Soaker hoses made from recycled tires are weatherproof and can be left in the garden all year long. There are only a couple of tricks to using soaker hoses. The first is to turn the water pressure on very low, so that the water weeps out evenly along the entire length of the hose. And, where possible, lay the hose on an incline so that the end is below the height of the faucet, so that gravity will help the water drain from it efficiently.
Sprinklers and Nozzles
When your whole yard is parched by dry weather, and the plants that wilted in the midday sun the day before are still drooping first thing the following morning, they are in dire need of irrigation.
If water use is not restricted in your community, running a sprinkler is the easiest solution. However, watering by hand may be your only alternative. Garden supply stores stock an array of special adjustable garden-hose nozzles, which will allow you to change the force and stream of water in keeping with the task at hand, making it possible to switch from a gentle shower to a misty spray without having to turn off the water.
If you keep a number of plants in containers, you will love what's called a watering wand. This is a sprinkler-type of nozzle with a long handle that screws onto the end of your hose. A watering wand
makes it easy to reach plants growing in high hanging baskets and other hard-to-reach areas.
Care-Free Watering
Whenever you water your garden plants, your objective should always be to soak the root zone rather than the foliage. Fungi that cause leaf-spot diseases become active when leaves are damp, so keeping leaves dry helps to prevent these problems. For this reason, it is often best to water early in the morning, so that water will soak into the soil before temperatures rise, and wet leaves can dry before the cool hours of evening. In arid climates, where disease is not a problem, water in the evening to reduce evaporation, and plants have all night to soak up water before facing dry wind or hot sun the following day.
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