How do you keep this garden well
watered and make sure you don't make any classic watering mistakes. I've probably done all of them myself
in the garden and it's been pretty heartbreaking sometimes when you lose
a plant that you put so much care into. So today we're going to do five watering
mistakes you're probably making. And if you're not, hopefully this video will help you
avoid them in the future and just get a deeper understanding of
watering in general. So let's
go ahead and get cracking. Mistake number one, the
most classic mistake, watering at the wrong time of day. Now, before we get into the right
time of day, the first question, and the first answer is the best time
to water your plants is when the plants need water. So if they're struggling, it doesn't really matter what time of day
you water because it's better than not watering at all. But given that
your plants are doing okay, the question then becomes, okay,
well what time of the day is best? And so the best in order is
going to be early morning, right as the sun's coming up. Then
late afternoon, early evening, and then evening. So in early morning, let's say you've got this bed of beans
here, there's some tomatoes here as well. Beans are a pretty shallow-rooted plant
and so by watering in the early morning, we're allowing water to actually
penetrate the soil, get into the subsoil, start getting absorbed by those
shallow-rooted bean plants. And then they're going to be nice and
turgid or full of water as the day progresses. So they're much more resistant to any
sort of large swings in temperature, et cetera. They're going to lose less water because
they have more water and they're not going to wilt as much. Just, it's just a much better scenario
for those bean plants in general, and that's going to apply to pretty
much every plant in the garden. So if you can afford it or if you've got
your drip system or your soaker system set up in a way where it's automated, it's really good to hit the
garden early in the morning. It's kind of also just a nice way to
start the day. You've got your coffee, you've got your little water
wand, whatever the case may be, and you're just hitting
the garden in the morning. Now next best is going to be
late afternoon, early evening, and you can see a trend here. We're just trying to avoid watering
in the heat of the day and that's just because so much of that water is going
to be lost very quickly to evaporation or if it's windy, it's going to sort
of evaporatively cool off the, the surface of the soil. So just avoid
the heat of the day and at the very, very last resort would be
watering in the evening. The evening is going to be okay
because it's not going to evaporate. You're still going to get that
penetration into the soil and the subsoil. So it's going to be able to
get used by the plants' roots, but at the same time it's not
going to evaporate at all. And also you really have to be careful
about watering over the top of your plants, which brings
us to our next mistake. What is wrong with that picture right
there? I almost cringe just doing it. Mistake number two, it's not the best idea to water
directly over the top of your plants. Now, this isn't as big of a deal as most
people say that it is in the garden, but we are going to go into a couple
of different ways to solve this and why it's a problem in general. All right, why is it a bad idea to water
over the top of your plants? That's a powerful spray. By the way guys, all of the watering products in today's
video are going to be from Ray Padula who are the sponsors. So thanks to them, they sent out a bunch of cool different
things to allow me to demonstrate different ways of watering and all the
links will be in the video description. So go ahead and check that out. But it's a bad idea to water over the
top of your plants for a couple different reasons. First of all, it's a
somewhat wasteful use of water. You're going to be just throwing
a lot onto the foliage of, of your leaves and your plants, and there's only so much they can take
through their leaves via the stomata. They're much more efficient at taking
up water through the root system, so it makes a lot more sense to use a
targeted tool or a drip line or a soaker hose and actually water at
the base, at the soil surface. Now there's other reasons
as well, you know. Plants that are susceptible to
disease, tomatoes, things like that. It's going to be a really good idea to
not splash soil all over the place and having a large spray coming from
above can throw little bits of soil, which is where a lot of these fungal
pathogens live. And then voila, all of a sudden now the plants that were
just fine are all of a sudden diseased and starting to die off. So not a
good idea there as well. Honestly, I will say that this mistake
is slightly overblown. Certainly fall crops are a little bit
more tolerant of being watered over the top of because they're acclimated to
be growing in the fall where weather usually turns a bit. It's a
little bit more rainy, you know, so they're acclimated to deal with that
a little bit better I would say than summer crops. And honestly, even
summer crops like these tomatoes here, these beans, they can handle overhead
watering earlier in their life. When they start to fruit that's really
when you want switch to either drip, soaker, irrigation or hand watering
with a water wand like this. It really allows you to get
in there and get targeted. Uh, but that's mistake number two
guys, do not, if you can avoid it, water over the top of your garden. Mistake number three is the holy grail
of mistakes - is either overwatering or underwatering your plants. This is a mistake that you're either
going to come on the high side or the low side of, you know. Either you're loving your plants to death
or you're being a little forgetful or perhaps not understanding the way that
water works its way through the soil or your container and making a mistake
on that side. So first of all, let's tackle underwatering. So we've had a couple of days of rain
here and it's not the best bed to use to describe and demonstrate this problem. But what I'm going to do
is show you underwatering, you can oftentimes think you watered
well enough and it actually feels in your brain, oh, I actually gave
these plants a lot of water. I dumped water all over the bed. And then you realize actually not much
of that water actually permeated down into that subsoil. So I've got my water
wand. This is the Ray Padula comfy grip. It's got this cool little
thumb nozzle toggle. And so what you'll do is
you'll often come through, you'll hit your garden just like this, remembering to try to not go
over the top of the leaves. And then once you're done or when
you think you're done at least, and that's sort of part of the problem, is you'll dig down into the
subsoil here and you'll notice, oh, only about a half inch is,
is wet. And so what I like to do, when it comes to watering
a raised bed specifically, is I do what's called the water, wait,
water method. So if you have, um, potting mixes that are high in
peat or somewhat dry to begin with, maybe they have a lot of
forest products in them, sometimes those are hard to rehydrate
and it takes a little bit of time for water to permeate them for it then
to allow water to get even lower. So what I'll do is I'll come through and
I'll water really quickly coating the surface of the soil, trying to just get full coverage over
the surface of the soil just like that. And then I'll just move on to another
bed, let it permeate a little bit. And then I come back and I hit it with
what I would call the real watering for that bed. And I find that that really allows the
water to actually get deeper into the soil. And then your plants are
healthier. But for underwatering, the biggest mistake you're probably
making is you're simply not checking after you water how deep it actually
went down. And so once you check, you actually will get
an understanding, okay, if I water this bed for
a couple of minutes, it ends up getting about three to four
inches down and that's actually what I need. So I would really recommend after
you water, dig down and check it out. Now let's talk about overwatering. The flip side to the problem we just
talked about is watering too much. And oftentimes this comes when we're
talking about container gardening because as you can see, this
little container here, which is a standard railing
planter or thin planter, doesn't really have a drainage hole. I
could drill one in here if I wanted to, but if it doesn't have a drainage hole
and it's made out of a plastic material, then chances are really
good if I water too much, the water is just going to sit in
there and it's never going to get out. It's certainly not going to evaporate
out or be used up by these young flower seedlings soon enough for me
to actually protect the plant. So signs of overwatering.
Very, very obvious signs. Root rot is probably the most obvious,
although that's below the soil. So sometimes that's hard to tell.
If you are a houseplant grower, you know you've probably overwatered
your plants before and had root rot. I would highly recommend first of
all, do that finger test again. You know, bury your finger down in, get
a sense of how wet the soil is, two, three, even four inches deep before
you commit to watering again. Even look at your weather. You know, out here in the garden in San Diego
at least sometimes it's hard for me to predict the weather because
we almost never get rain. And then I get blindsided when we actually
get rain and I may have just watered the garden and then there's some
overwatering issues going on. But what you're going to find when you
have overwatering is certainly root rot. There actually counterintuitively
can be some wilting. And then also leaves can start to yellow. So if you think you're not
suffering a nutrient deficiency, there's no pest or disease issue, but you're still having plant problems
that are similar to the ones I just described, chances are you might
be overwatering. And so again, I would say it's much more common in
these smaller containers if you're a container gardener to overwater than it
is in a raised bed because oftentimes a raised bed has nice
drainage at the bottom. And even if you just dump a whole lot of
water in there, it still will run out. That's still not good. You're still
probably leaching that soil of nutrition, but it's better than flooding the bed. And so I say if you're a
container gardener, just really, really watch out for overwatering. Mistake number four is watering all of
your plants the same way regardless of what they are, regardless of where
they are in their life cycle. And regardless of the method that you're
using to grow. So what you see here, I've got about 16 different leafy
green seedlings in my veggie pod, which actually does have a top
irrigation on this cover right here. But just for the sake of example, I've put a soaker hose in from Ray Padula
just to show you why and how to think about irrigating and watering crops
in different stages of their life. So a seedling, what does a seedling
have? It has a very shallow root system. It's just starting its life and it is
relatively sensitive and it is really not penetrating too much of that soil. So let's say we went ahead and put this
little system on drip irrigation with emitters. Well that might not be the best idea
because the way that a drip emitter works is you've got your drip line like this
and then there's emitters every x amount of distance. But that puts out a
plume of water in a specific spot, which seedlings aren't robust enough
to have their roots seek that out. They need water right where they are. And so that's why if you're
not going to hand water, another good option could
be to use something like a
soaker hose because that's going to emit water throughout
the entire length of the hose. It sort of seeps out or soaks
out as the name implies, and that's going to irrigate
much, much better. So seedlings, when you're watering, you're going
to want to water right next to them. Make sure you give them enough and you
do have to sort of baby them a little bit, right? Those roots aren't that deep. The top surface of the soil of
course is what dries out first. So you do have to come in and make
sure you give them some water. So let's see how the soaker hose
ends up working. So as you can see, you can see the water just oozing out
across the entire length of the soaker hose and that's exactly what we want. And if you're doing it really
well and aligning it perfectly, you could just align it along
your rows really smoothly. And it works a lot better in larger beds. But you can see how this would be
advantageous as compared to running a drip line through a system like this because
each of these little seedlings is getting water pretty much exactly where
it needs it. This one's right here, water is coming out right
there. This one's right here. Water is coming out right here. Instead of potentially being on a
drip right there or right there, we're just missing it a little bit. So a much more effective
way to irrigate this system. What do we do after our plants have
gotten past that seedling phase? Or maybe we're growing a plant
that's actually producing fruit. So here we have a glacier tomato. You can see it's setting
a lot of fruit right now. That means it's in its heavy production
phase of life. As we all know, tomatoes have quite a
bit of water within them, so it makes a lot of sense to increase
our watering during this phase. They're using more water, they're sucking it up and they're
holding it in these big fruits. And so we're going to need to
increase our water during that phase. And then you've got plants like leafy
greens that you can sort of water the same way you would normally water because
we're just growing those for their vegetation. So all you need to do is make sure you
water enough for nice healthy vegetative growth and you're good to go. But for something like a tomato or
plants that throw out a ton of fruit, watermelon, cantaloupe,
squash, these sorts of things, you really do have to modulate up that
watering as they get into that fruiting phase. Our fifth and final
problem when it comes to watering, which is actually a problem in many
aspects of gardening because it's so important, is not using mulch. It almost doesn't even matter what you
use as mulch provided that you actually use it. Of course, I
prefer organic matter. This is actually a product I
really liked from E.B. Stone. It's their Top Coat Seed Cover &
Mulch. It's a very fine material. I'll show you some right now.
Very, very fine material here, but you don't have to use that. In
fact, in my potato beds right here, I'm just using straw. So just covering the hills with a
little bit of straw and that's providing enough moisture protection so
that they don't dry out. Potatoes, if they're in dry soil, the yield just
goes way down. But mulch in general, so there's a whole host of
benefits outside of watering. But basically what it does is it locks
the water into the soil that you've already watered. So if
you're watering on bare soil, especially if it's a little
bit more porous mixture, it's going to evaporate
out relatively quickly. Whereas if you provide maybe an inch or
two, maybe even three or four inches, depending on your style of gardening of
wood chip mulch, this type of top coat, a more fine mixture, straw,
uh, shredded newspaper, pine needles, all that type of stuff is going to
help lock in that moisture and actually protect the soil in many more ways
besides just the issues of watering. And so not using mulch is a huge
problem in gardening in general, but certainly a problem
when it comes to watering. So here in my potato bed
you can see it's not a lot, but it's enough of straw mulch
to just protect these hills. And it just keeps a little
bit more moisture in than
would normally be kept and it's just a really cheap
effective way to lock in moisture. Bonus tip of sorts is to go ahead and
use some kind of tool to make your watering easier. So there's a lot
of different things you can use. These are all sent out by Ray Padula. I figured we'd run through a couple
of different options so you could see exactly what's out there
in the watering world. I mean this is going to be one of your
most crucial go-to's and that would be a one outlet hose timer. So if you have a very simple gardening
system that only requires one hose to irrigate everything, you can
put that one hose on a timer. And let's say you know you're watering
your garden and it needs an inch a week, then perhaps you can just set it to go
off twice a week for half an inch worth of water once you do the math. And the hose timer is going
to water your garden for you. And oftentimes you connect this to drip
or soaker and then you're watering at that soil surface, which is really
nice. If you prefer hand watering, which I often really enjoy hand
watering, it allows me to get out there, test stuff out in the
garden, make my observations, you can grab obviously
a simple hose nozzle. And this one's kind of nice because it
has the thumb control here instead of the squeeze control, which I kinda like. But one thing I really like is sometimes
I'll want to swap this out for perhaps a water wand. And so you can make use of quick
connects instead of having to screw and unscrew. So what a quick connect is, is it screws in with the
normal teeth over here. And then you've got this sort
of looking device right here. And then what I'll do is I'll take, this
is actually a host splitter right here, but what you'll do is you'll screw on
the quick connect and then you pull this down, slide it in, slide it up, and now you can connect and disconnect
tools really, really quickly, which I find to be really, really nice. And then speaking of something to speed
things up, this is a hose splitter, right? So one input into two outputs. Perhaps you could even start chaining
things together like this and connecting one to a timer. You know it needs to
be irrigated on a specific schedule. And then this one you could just
be quick connecting in and out of. So there's a lot of different ways
when it comes to watering that you can customize your setup. So you can do things in a really quick
and efficient way because honestly the quicker and more efficient
you are in the garden, oftentimes the better your results.
So that's it for today's video guys, I hope you guys enjoyed it. If
you have any questions, concerns, your own watering tip that you'd like
to share, perhaps a mistake you made, leave it down in the comments. I try
to read and respond to all of them. So till next time, good luck in
the garden and keep on growing.
