Watering... whats your regulations, what do you use....ect.

[nightshade]

Watering what do you do? Its a simple question with a couple dozen answers.

Me I have a rain barrel and a soaker hose for just about every bed I have. And a few extra barrels for hand watering from.

 

[silkiechicken]

We normally don't have water shortages... rather a lot of areas here flood. Matter of fact, earlier this month a section of the freeway was under 8-13 feet of water due to flooding... :/

As for summer, I water once or twice a week, about 400 gallons each time, depending on how many times it rained that week and if the sun came out or not. Now if I had a rain barrel, that would be great. One week we got a 12 inches of rain. Imagine catching that one week of rain in a barrel for summer from the roof! The average rain per year though is about 3 feet.

 

[sgtsheart]

We don't have water restrictions either. We use the town water supply for our daily use, but we also have two active wells just in case. Neither has ever run dry. One is located in a pump house right next to the garden space, so I think I'm all set.

 

[Reinbeau]

We've always got a water ban, handheld only between the hours of 7-9 morning and night. What they can see they don't know about Thing is I don't water my lawn at all, I'm very careful with watering, so I don't feel a bit guilty about it. I pay for my water, my bill was quite a bit higher this year because of the lack of rain.

 

[digitS']

Watering what do you do? Its a simple question with a couple dozen answers.

Yes, Nightshade, it is a little difficult to answer simply.

We had just over 1 inch of rain during Summer, 2007. Yep, that's for the entire 3 months. Without irrigation, there'd be no gardening here.

I have quite large gardens and cannot afford to install drip irrigation - so everything is watered with overhead sprinklers. Compounding the difficulty of maintaining consistent soil-moisture is the porous nature of my garden soil. Heck, it's good enuf to mine for gravel and I'm not kidding!!

I measure the time needed for the sprinklers to put 3/4 inch of water on the ground. With 3 tuna fish cans set at various distances from the sprinklers and a watch, I can see how long it takes to fill the cans to that level. Doing this once is all it takes.

The sprinklers run twice a week because those are the limits of the time I have to do the job. So, I'm trying to get 1 1/2 inches of water down weekly. With this porous soil, it would be better for me to water 3 times each week, I believe. But, the scheduling does not work out and if I put only one-half inch down, evaporation would probably claim too much of it.

Oh yeah, I also have to water during the middle of the day. I would be so much happier to run the water early in the morning.

Steve

 

[Rosalind]

I don't. Mostly, I am lazy. Also, if I am running the hose, it's going to be to fill up the swimming pool. Anyway, we had a horrible drought last August, and there were lots of water use bans.

I picked real estate that had decent rainfall and used to be farmland, but which had not been cultivated for some time and had enough trees that there was some organic stuff on top of the clay. The previous owner kept horses, cows and sheep, so there was also some natural fertilizer around (a whole barn full, in fact).

Every plant I want to grow, I make sure there's two or three varieties of each. Then I make a note of which grew best in my notebook, and get more of that. If some things don't grow at all, oh well, I just don't grow 'em.

I don't dig anything if I can help it. Digging dries out the soil and makes more weeds. I just dump chicken litter, manure, compost, leaves, etc. on top if I need a deeper soil for something. All that stuff holds more moisture in the dirt.

I hate my grass and wouldn't mind if it all turned brown and died, but it never does. I don't water it, either. It's not a nice carpet, though, it's kinda weedy and full of clover, different kinds of grass, Queen Anne's Lace. It does stay green even though all I do is mow it when I'm feeling inspired.

Basically, I would rather spend my weekends and evenings watching birds in the garden, swimming, and picking veggies than weeding or watering. I like having a garden, I don't like having to work on it all the time, so I avoid the work as much as possible. If that means I only get about three salad cukes in a dry year, so be it.

 

[patandchickens]

I'm more or less like Rosalind. We're on a well, so water bans or lack thereof don't really affect us (tho our neighbors sometimes have their wells run dry, and as ours is pretty shallow, we do try to conserve water in general). But I just generally don't feel right using groundwater that could go to some much more important purpose just to keep a lawn green or an inappropriate plant growing prettily. Also it takes time and energy to water

So, the only watering I do is

a) newly planted things (veggies when first planted, perennials as needed for a month or two, and shrubs and trees as needed for the first year) and
b) watering the dryest looking plants/beds deeply just a couple of times or so during a really dry summer. The problem with watering more often is that it discourages plants from sending roots downwards where they belong, so even if I am going to water a plant, I prefer to wait until it seems on the brink of sustaining permanent damage . Really, for my money, if it can't get roots deep enough to survive our climate, it oughtn't be growing here anyhow, no matter how pretty or tasty.

We're in a low spot on clay (except the flowers in front of the house are on very sandy soil), and don't have too many days in the 90s F, so that certainly helps... but honestly I would be doing the same thing even if we lived in a desert on sand, I'd just be learning to like desert sand vegetation No matter where you are, there will be lots of things you wish you could grow but can't, right? Of course a veg garden would need frequent watering under those conditions, but, you know what I mean.

I spend a fair amount of effort getting the ground loosened up, adding organic material, multching, and then making sure beds don't get walked on, all of which greatly improves the ground's ability to hold whatever rain (or rare watering) it does recieve. I only watered the tomatoes I think three times last year and they were a JUNGLE, probably 10x the production that I was getting when we first moved in and I watered regularly but the soil was completely unimproved.

Our lawn actually looks better (at least from a distance) than most in this area come August, partly because of the low-area-with-clay thing but primarily because the lawn is about half weeds and the weeds do much much better during droughts than the lawn does Things like clover, bugle, hawkweed and that yellow vetch stuff can give a nice green effect even when the grass itself is all brown and crispy. THe trick is to have a plentitude of weeds everywhere. FOrtunately that is something I am good at, lawn-management-wise <lol>

Pat

 

[miss_thenorth]

Water......We don't have a well, and we don't have town water. We have a
holding tank in the ground that we need to fill up. We truck it in ourselves as opposed to paying someone to do it, so we do have the option of using the garden hose., but...

This spring will be my first garden at this house,. We do have a huge workshop that my dh wants to put gutters on, and we will collect rain water in huge drums that my dh can get from work-(they throw out theses huge drums that could be used for potable water storage). There are also gutters on the barn, that we could use to collect rain water. The garden will be in between the shop and barn.

I too, have NEVER waterd my lawn. When we lived in the subdivision--all our neighbours were complaining about our, and one other neighbours lawns, since the two of us were the only ones on the street not watering.

My vegetable garden will probably be watered as needed, provided I have enough rain water to supply.

 

[jc12551]

Since I container garden, watering is a twice a day thing. I water before and after 7. This avoids the heat. I collect all the water I need from my air conditioner drip. The main unit is upstairs and there is a pipe that runs down the side of the house into a barrel. Since humidity is 100% and temps are over a 100 degrees, when we cool the air we get LOTS of water. Some days I can't use it all. I normally collect rainwater, but since we didn't get any this summer....

We are not on restrictions here, even though the whole state is. I have never watered a lawn, ever.