Now, the No.1 thing about watering is having the right equipment. Most people at home have a standard 12mm or ½ inch garden hose. And if they go to their local big green hardware store starting with “B” and they get one of those typical little watering guns, when they stand there on a hot summer’s night watering their garden, they think they are getting a lot of water into the ground. But they’re not really. A set up like this would take over a minute or more to fill a typical 10-litre bucket or watering can.
Now you can’t really see the difference until you swap your regular garden hose for an 18mm or ¾ inch garden hose. And what you’ll discover is that the smaller hose is actually holding the water back and stopping you from getting a good flow. If you put the larger diameter hose on the same tap you will get a massive increase in the flow of water out of the same tap.
So much so that with an 18mm hose, you can fill a 10-litre bucket or watering can in around 10 seconds. That’s more than 6 times faster than a standard half-inch hose.
Now the other mistake people make is using these cheap watering guns on the end of their small hoses. They often have them set to make a fine misting spray so they don’t damage their plants but the problem is that doesn’t give the plant much water at all, especially over a hot summer.
Bottom line is that if your hose nozzle is making a lot of noise then it’s doing so because it’s restricting the flow of water coming out of the tap and not letting much out onto your plants. It’s putting the brakes on the water and holding back the flow, which is NOT what you want in a hot Melbourne summer.
But if you add the right nozzle to your larger 18 mm hose you can get a very gentle spray that still delivers a lot of water. We actually have a fantastic nozzle at our store that we use that was designed over 50 years ago. It was created in the US by someone who wanted a very gentle spray that would mimic rain but deliver a huge volume of water. And this head does that. (You can buy them online on our website here but they ONLY fit to the larger 18mm or 3/4″ inch hose.) The other thing that’s great about these nozzles or rosettes is they are very quiet. Those cheap plastic guns make a lot of noise when the spray of water comes out but these aluminium nozzles have this soft spray that comes out so quietly.
It’s also a great time saver as it delivers so much water very quickly without damaging your plants or disturbing the soil.
Another point about your standard garden hose is, have you ever tried to drink the water out of the hose? If you have you might find it tastes funny. That’s because the plastic they make the hose out of is not very good quality and there are various toxins in that plastic that leach out into the water making it taste bad. In complete contrast, the ¾ inch hoses we sell at our nursery are made from a food grade material so if you drink the water out of the hose it takes pure and clean. Also these hoses don’t bend and kink like the cheap thinner ones and they don’t go hard and crack in the hot Aussie sun. This means they not only deliver much more water to your garden, it’s better quality water too.
So you can see just by changing your hose and the watering head you attach to it, can make your watering up to 6 times more effective. Maybe it’s time for you to put your old hose and watering gun in the recycling bin! That would be a good start for you to become a master waterer.
Now the next thing to think about with watering is your mindset. Personally I don’t see watering as just standing there with a hose. But many people do, they think they’re just doing something effective to wet the plants and stop them from dying. But in our nursery we’re not just watering our plants to keep them alive. It’s more than that. We’re actually watering them because they enjoy it. That’s right, they ENJOY it.
Now many plants love the hot summer, they love the hot sun. But they need adequate water to grow and flourish. And just like we enjoy a nice cool drink after a long hot day, so do our plants. So don’t just think about “Hey I don’t want my plants to die”. Think like this, “I really want my plants to flourish!” “I want my plants to grow beautifully.” “I want my plants to thrive”. So it’s a positive thing you are doing for them and giving them when you water them and that’s why you need the right equipment.
Another important point when it comes to watering is to not forget about the edges. If you have square shaped garden beds or anything with corners or spaces away from the plants, then make sure you water the edges of the garden bed and the backs and the corners too. If you do, the middle tends to take care of itself. But many people just water around the base of plants rather than the whole garden bed, so don’t forget to water the edges and the corners too. Plants draw moisture from a wider area than you probably imagine.
Now the next most important thing to tell you about in your search to become a master waterer is soil wetter. So what is a soil wetter and how does it work? Well soil wetters break down the surface tension of the soil to the water so that the water moves quickly and easily through the soil.
So what is the very best soil wetter? Well in my opinion, it’s actually water!!! What do I mean? Well it’s like this. Say you’ve been away for the weekend and you come back and all your pots are bone dry and the plants are just looking very parched and thirsty, if you just go and pound them with water, you’d be amazed. If pulled that plant out of the pot 10 or 15 minutes later, you’d realise there’s just a little bit of water on the top of the soil.
If your plants are bone dry, the best way to water them is to water them two or three times, like this. So you come home, you look at your plants and think, wow, they’re really, really dry. Well give them a fairly quick little water and then you leave them. Go off and have a cup of tea or whatever, then come back in half an hour and give ’em another water. Then, if they’re really, really dry, you might give them a third water.
As an example, we’ve got a lot of succulents growing in our backyard and we didn’t water them for a couple of weeks as I was away. When I got back I went out there and I found that to get the water to the bottom of the pot actually took three waterings. The first watering was fairly quick, the second watering went a little bit longer and that started to get the water halfway down the pot, but to get the water to the bottom of the pot actually took three waterings. So depending on how dry you plants are the secret is that water is fantastic at getting water into the ground.
It’s a funny thing. I used to have a nursery in the middle of Emerald and when the fields were really dry in summer, if we had some summer rain, I’d race out there, put the pump on and put all my sprinklers on to water the plants. People would actually ring me up and say, “Hey Chris, it’s raining and did you know your sprinklers are on?” They thought I was crazy. But in actual fact, if you want to get your paddock really, really wet deep down, the best thing to do is water in the rain.
It’s the same thing in the garden. If your garden’s pretty dry and it’s dry down deep, you’ve got a bit of summer rain, get out there and water in the rain. People will think you are crazy but your plants will love it because it’s like they are getting a double-soak and remember nothing wets the soil better than water!
Now even I can have some challenges when it comes to watering. Recently I had a situation where we had a sort of funny dry spell in late spring, early summer. I came home one day and it seemed like all of a sudden my birches had yellow leaves forming there and I could tell that they were really, really stressed. I knew they’d be stressed down deep. I went and had a look and the soil around the bushes was all cracked. So what I did was I gave them two or three waterings and that got the water in and finally gave them the really big soaking they were looking for. It was funny if I’d just gone out there and stood there for ages trying to do one long watering, the water would’ve been running off here and running off there. But because I did a couple of waters I got a lot into the ground.
Probably the most important thing in terms of watering, is making sure that the ground is moist enough that the water can be accepted deep down. So you come home from work after a long hot day and your plants look dry, then give them a quick squirt, go have dinner, then come back and give ’em a big soak. And if they’re really, really dry, do it a third time.
Now apart from not watering enough, the big question everyone has is, how do you know if you are watering too much? Well the first thing to be careful of with watering is plants like succulents, you know, cactus and the like. Also your Cordylines and your lavenders don’t want too much water. They need a bit of a break between their waterings.
Now here in our nursery we’ve got hundreds of thousands of plants and in summer we water them all every day. And if there’s a heat wave, we’ll water them twice a day.
The frequency of watering for your plants can be affected by the quality of your potting mix. If you’ve got a good quality potting mix then it will let the water in, let it go through and then let it out. But a poor quality potting mix initially repels water. But if you keep watering and the water finally gets into it, it’ll get too wet and stay wet. That’s because in these cheap potting mixes to try and make a profit from selling them so low, they have to add cheap fillers into the mix like sawdust for example. Once it gets wet it just holds the water. It can also contain chicken manure that can burn the roots of some plants.
Your guide to potting mix really comes down to price. If you’re seeing bags of potting mix on sale for $3, they are not worth buying because they will be full of cheap fillers.
But a good quality potting mix, like the Nature’s Soil that we use in our nursery is a commercial quality mix that is being made for professional nurserymen like me. And we are much more demanding than our customers when it comes to potting mix. It has to be really good because we use it to pot our plants and we would stop buying it straight away if they started putting cheap ingredients in it. (You can buy it from our store.)
So if you’re using good quality potting mix and unless it’s a succulent or a cactus, basically you can water every day through summer and the water will go in flow through and go away. So basically it’s impossible to water too much with plants in pots if you’ve got a good potting mix.
Where it is possible to water too much is with plants in your garden. Now we often have problems where people come in and buy, say a Weeping Cherry or a Weeping Maple. And what happens is that they put their Weeping Cherry in or their Weeping Maple and then they’ll put down turf around it. And the turf people tell them to water their turf 6 times a day. And so what they’ll do is they water the turf for 20 minutes, 6 times a day! In a week or say 10 days later, the Weeping Cherry or Weeping Maple is dead.
Now that is definitely a case of watering too much because basically you don’t need to water turf that much. If it is hot weather and you’re planting turf and you’ve got other plants you’ve just planted around it as well, you only need to water the turf once really thoroughly. Then after that you just spray the turf for a minute or 30 seconds just to keep the grass wet. You might water it 6 or 8 times a day, but you just spray it lightly so the grass is kept cool and moist and happy. You DON’T give it a deep soaking 6 times a day!
Generally speaking, in the garden you would give plants in the warm weather a good soak once a week. If it was particularly hot, you’d give them a soak two or three times a week and you’re really not going to get into trouble in the garden that way.
Okay, so say you’ve got a section of your garden that’s terribly dry or it’s dried right out and you don’t know what to do. Well this is where you would use an soil wetting agent. There are a number of them around and they are all similar. (We sell one called SaturAid.) Now these are great but I wouldn’t use them unless you have a specific problem to solve, because they are a sort of agricultural detergent and that’s not necessarily kind to the environment. But when you have a real reason to use them, they can do a good job.
So say you have a situation like I did a while ago with a hedge out the back of my place. It had dried right out underneath and was starting to drop leaves and look a bit crook. So what I did was get out the old soaker hose, those ones with the small holes that put out little sprinkling jets of water. I put on about twice the recommended dose of the soil wetter around the base of the hedge and then ran the soaker hose for 30 minutes at a time, every few hours. That combination worked brilliantly because the soaker hose doesn’t flood the place and the soil wetter in combination helped the water get right down deep into the roots. So that’s one example of where I might use a soil wetting product.
Another situation I would use an actual soil wetting product is when planting, especially if you are planting in summer. Now when they are planting, a lot of people will dig the hole, put in the potting mix with the plant and then maybe top it up with mulch or topsoil or something. So you might have 3 different types of soil mixture that this plant and its root system is sitting in. And they will have different rates at which they will absorb or let water flow through them. So what I would recommend is with summer planting is to put some soil wetting agent in the bottom of the hole and then some on the top when you have finished planting. Give it a really good soak and the soil wetter will help draw the water through all the different layers of soil and help disperse it into the ground beneath the plant.
Now what about mulching some people say. Well mulching doesn’t add moisture to the soil by itself. It is for helping keep the moisture you put in the ground stay there. So if you’ve got a problem with some part of your garden drying out, then mulch is not the answer.
Once you’ve got the water into the ground nice and deep then you might go for some mulch to try and keep it in there. You’ll find once you get some water down deep, it’s not hard to keep it moist. But when it’s really, really dried right out, getting it wet again can be quite difficult. But if you apply my approach of multiple waterings in a row, with a good big soak at the end, then you can solve this problem without mulch.
Another problem people have with watering plants in summer is that’s when we tend to go away on holidays and we might have to get a friend or neighbour to water our garden and plants for us. (Maybe show them this article before you put them in charge of the watering!!!) But basically, you can do a lot of things to help your plants cope with the heat while you are away. If you have any of the more delicate plants that don’t like the heat and sun too much, then move them into shade, under the carport or even in the garage where they will be out of the direct hot sun. And if you sit them in trays or anything that can hold some water that they draw back up again this will also help them cope with the heat. You can get a range of large plastic trays or saucers at our nursery to put under your pots and they can hold quite a bit of water to keep the soil in the pot damp for longer. They come in sizes up to 63 cm. Without a saucer under them, many pot plants might only last a few days without water but with the saucer they can last up to a week.
So there you have it, all the ins and outs of watering from someone who learnt the hard way as a child how to water properly. The biggest problem with watering is to think there is nothing to it and it’s just simple and holding a hose. But I hope from reading this article that you now realise you’ve got to know what equipment to use. You’ve got to know when to water and how to water. You’ve got to know what to do when it rains and when it doesn’t.
Remember too your mindset if you’re a keen gardener, you’re not there to just keep your plants alive. You’re there to have them flourish. Keeping your plants alive is one thing. Having them flourish is a whole different ballgame. And flourish means that the plant has adequate water right to the bottom of the pot or the plant in the garden down deep where its roots are, so it has plenty of water to draw on. And if you do that, you’ll have a really beautiful garden.
Let me tell you a story to finish this article off which I think illustrates the point I’ve been trying to make. I had a customer once who was actually a weatherman on one of the TV stations and he bought a whole lot of Mop Tops from me. Soon after he rang me up and said, “look, I’ve bought a lot of Mop Tops off you and they’ve got a disease or something. They’re all just turning brown and dying. I need you to have a look at them.”
So I went over to see him and he had this beautiful lush green lawn, absolutely fabulous green cooch lawn. Fantastic. And then he had these Mop Tops everywhere in the garden. It was a very modern house with Mop Tops and green lawn. And there they were. There was a dead one here and a dead one there. And he’d been replacing a few too. So I started scraping some of the dirt away at the base of one of the Mop Tops and I dug down a bit and there was dust. So I dug a bit further and it was just dust, dust, dust, dust, dust down deep. I said to him, you need to water them. He said, I do. He said, I water them every day. I said, how long for? He said for 30 seconds!
What he was doing was he was keeping the grass really lush and beautiful with 30 seconds of water every day. His lawns were fantastic, but his Mop Tops had not enough water. He wasn’t watering them. He was actually teasing them with just a little bit of water every day that never really soaked into the ground and just probably evaporated of the top of the soil, leaving dust below. So I said to him, just water your Mop Tops for 1 hour every week. Give them a huge soaking once a week. I never heard from him again so I assume that worked for it, as it would have! So giving your garden a big long soak is better than small regular waterings.
Happy watering!!
