Lawn Watering Tips - How long should you water your lawn? In-ground System VS Manual Sprinklers.

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I recently had a conversation that inspired this video with one of my neighbors actually this neighbor behind me over here on the left hand side and the question was about watering the lawn he's using in-ground irrigation and someone at at some point I don't know if it was the people that cut the grass or maybe it was a friend I didn't really tell me who but told them that just to water the lawn for ten minutes a day every day and it should help as as the weather starts to heat up a little bit it'll help the grass with the stress from the heat so I will say that I certainly disagree with that theory um I'm more of the water heavy and infrequently and I even you know looked up my own theory I looked at the facts behind that and I looked at the Purdue Extension and their turf science program and what they had to say about watering the lawn and Purdue recommends for cool-season lawns and and really most grass types are gonna want at least an inch to an inch and a half of water every week especially when you see signs of stress so discoloration in the grass maybe you notice that it's starting to go dormant starting to check out a little bit maybe you've got some some areas where you have some localized dry spots you really don't need to start watering until you can visually see those types of things going on on the lawn whether you are have in ground irrigation like I do or maybe you're using a manual impact sprinkler like this one either way is fine use what you've got just make sure you're getting the water down so what I wanted to do is I wanted to test that theory I'm gonna run my sprinklers for 10 minutes I'm gonna run a 10 minutes per zone and I'm gonna use the tunic and method if you're not familiar with what the tunic and Method is all you really want to do is take two empty tuna cans and set them just kind of a zigzag pattern out on to the lawn run you print your sprinklers and you can tell exactly how much water you're getting down in each one of those zones it'll actually help you determine if you're getting an even watering in certain zones of your lawn so I've got one end of my lawn that is wider than the other so my head spaced are closer together on one side where it's more narrow and on the side where it's wider so I actually want to see how much water I'm getting down compared to one side of my lawn in conjunction to the other so the tunic and Method is really popular because the tuna cans are I think they're an inch they're maybe a little bit more than an inch in the depth here so you'll be able to tell how much water you're getting down just by simply taking a tape measure and sticking that down into the tuna can when you measure the water so you can see how much water you're getting down the tuna can so enough talking let's go ahead and get started let's run these zones for 10 minutes to put the tuna cans out on the lawn and see how much water we get down in 10 minutes [Music] [Music] as a full disclaimer here - I should probably mention that I normally would water in the middle of the afternoon like I am now typically my water I will do that in the early morning around 4:00 a.m. a couple reasons for that is you don't get as much distortion from the wind usually there's not as much wind at at that time in the in the morning and then also it's usually not as hot so you don't have to worry about any evaporation from the heat from you know the water get on the grass blades and evaporating into the air another good point to make to you is that at 4 o'clock in the morning there's probably not going to be anyone using a dishwasher or a wash machine or running a shower or anything along those lines it's going to affect the pressure to your irrigation system seem to be said if you're using a manual sprinkler like an impact sprinkler so those are all factors that are going to throw up how much water is actually getting to the grass if you're using water in other parts of the house that's going to take away from the pressure to the sprinkler heads now everybody's sprinkler head pressure or water pressure at their house is going to be different based on a number of variables plumbing where you live what type of water do you have in the house city water well water or whatever the case may be everyone's pressure ratings are gonna be different so that's why the tuna can test comes in handy when you want to find out exactly how much water you're getting down at any given time all right so here we go this is after 10 minutes of runtime on the two zones on my front lawn so very little water you get down in 10 minutes and when I put the tape measure down into the tuna can yeah it's about it's about an eighth of an inch of water in there so this is definitely not gonna cut it and according to Purdue the average homeowner system it takes roughly 30 to 35 minutes to get at least a half inch of water down or more more so let's go ahead and let's bump it up let's run another 25 minutes we'll leave the water in these tuna cans run the system for another 25 minutes and see what happens [Music] so running zones on the irrigation system here on the front at 25 minutes we already ran at 10 so a total of 35 minutes per zone in the middle of the day it's like in the mid-80s here I probably got a little bit of evaporation and probably a little bit of drift or some distortion from the wind but I've got a half inch of water in the tuna cans which is nice so that tells me if I want to get a half inch of water down per watering I need to run my zones for 35 minutes a piece if I want to step that up a little bit I could go 45 minutes and maybe do that once a week rather than twice a week and do really heavy watering but like you just soak it and let the lawn dry out and then come back and do it again so I want to go ahead and try this theory also with the impact sprinkler and do manual watering and see how long it takes for us to get a half inch of water out of a impact sprinkler hook template just hose [Music] the reason I have impact sprinklers because I have an area of my backyard here where the irrigation heads back here don't reach and so I'll drag the hose down to the bottom of the hill and I'll run the impact sprinkler down here so the idea is let's test how much water the impact sprinkler puts down I'd say we'll check it in about 30 minutes and see what we've got in the tunic and I got two of them spread out here now I need to get one of those fancy hoses like Jimmy Lewis the hose link dragging that thing down here kind of sucks we'll see all right so we're all the story you know it can be done using an impact sprinkler and you're moving all around the yard you don't have it in ground irrigation system again that's totally fine it's gonna take you a lot longer to get that amount of water down so you're probably looking at maybe two hours to run that sprinkler in any certain part of the yard and then move that to a different part of the yard or running again the reason why it's gonna take you so much longer is because you're trying to cover so much more ground which is one sprinkler head the other option is to run a chain of sprinklers connected by hoses and this in the spikes and maybe have those impact heads kind of in a line you probably get it done a lot faster so I hope you guys gained something from this video definitely a big advocate for watering infrequently and a lot heavier less often so I like to do about 40 minutes per zone probably twice a week in the summer you can do that in one big soaking I like to split those up and I like to do two separate watering is just in case I get rain that week then I can only water once and I can rely on the rain to give me my second watering so with that I appreciate you guys tuning in thanks for sticking around for another video and we'll see you in the next one [Music]
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Channel: Turf Culture
Views: 46,661
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: lawn care tips, do it yourself, how to, lawn care, lawn care nut, lawncare, DIY, Toro, Tall fescue, bush league, heat stress, lawn care for beginners, lawn equipment, weeds, Do it yourself, fix my crappy lanw, grass, Carbon earth, domination, irrigation, sprinklers, how to water the lawn
Id: YkU1OxmeLDw
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Length: 9min 44sec (584 seconds)
Published: Fri Jun 26 2020
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