sadly i am coming to the end of my outdoor gardening season here in zone six ohio
so it might seem a little bit weird to be talking about watering the garden right now but now is
actually a great time of year to start thinking about watering in that i can start planning for
next spring now one of the questions i get most frequently especially when i do garden tours and
folks see the size of the gardens that i'm dealing with is how do you water all of that so today i
just wanted to share with you what i do some of the mistakes i've made what i plan on changing for
the future and some of my tricks for limiting the amount of watering i actually have to do out here
my first tactic is to use soaker hose or drip irrigation and i use this method specifically for
when i put out transplants and i'm not getting enough rain to really get them watered in well
during their first couple days in the garden i'll typically use this in my long narrow planting rows
and i'll lay a soaker hose down the middle of the row and plant my transplants on either side
after i get them planted i'll just let the soaker hose run for several hours sometimes even up to
overnight depending on how dry the ground is and if needed i'll run it a couple more times in the
following week week and a half just to make sure that those transplants are really getting watered
in well now you could do the very same thing with drip irrigation i have very very hard water here
so a lot of iron a lot of sediment things that will clog up irrigation really really easily
so i tend to have a little bit better luck with the soaker hoses that being said these get clogged
up eventually too so either way whether i'm using drip tape or soaker hose they tend to
only last me a season or two the cost to replace these every couple of years is worth it to me
because of the amount of time it saves me and how effectively this waters the root zone
the one thing i hope to change about my system using drip tape or soaker hose going forward is
that right now to run hoses out here in the garden i have to basically take a giant long hose drag it
through my garden fence drag it clear up to the house and attach it to our faucet on the house
what would be ideal is to actually run an underground line from the house out to the
garden with a spigot hookup out here whether it be in the barn or a header near the garden
just so that i'm not having to drag hoes back and forth all the time so that's one of my future
projects i hope to accomplish my second method of watering is just a good old-fashioned sprinkler
and i found through years of trial and error that there are a couple specific types that
work best for what i am doing out here the first is an irrigation pole this is a very
very old hand-me-down i'm not even sure they make this exact model anymore or this may have even
been a handmade job but it basically has a brass impact sprinkler head attached to the top of this
very tall pole this is at least 15 feet if not 20 i've never actually measured you just attach
a hose down here to run it and the sprinkler because of its height when turned on full blast
can reach almost my entire garden so when it is really really dry and everything desperately
needs water i will turn this on typically overnight and just let it run all night to
mimic a really good deep rain now what's nice about this particular pool irrigation system
is that if you have really good water pressure you can actually hook multiple posts together and run
them all at the same time to cover a huge expanse i don't have that good of water pressure so i can
really only run one at a time but it's something to consider if you have a lot of space to cover
my second sprinkler is a spike style sprinkler and i like this a lot because i can water by specific
zone the few raised beds that i have typically need watered much more frequently than anything
that i have in ground so with the spike style sprinkler i can just shove it in a raised bed
run it for a little while and not worry about over watering the stuff that doesn't need water
in the garden it's also very lightweight and easy to move around which is handy when i'm in a hurry
and the third sprinkler that i really like is the tripod style that i use at my parents
similar idea to the spike sprinkler in that i can water specific zones such as one garden at a time
and because the tripod has adjustable settings we can set this to pretty much cover just one
garden bed at a time again it's very very lightweight easy to move around and set up
so i can move it to whichever bed needs water and not worry about watering a lot of extraneous
area while i'm doing this and a final word on sprinklers and overhead irrigation in general
if you live in an area where you're prone to fungal and bacterial foliar diseases
and or diseases that are spread via spore splash up from the dirt overhead irrigation is definitely
not the best route to go a method like drip irrigation where the water is not splashing up
all over the plant foliage is a much better choice i do have a lot of these issues but ultimately the
convenience of using the sprinklers outweighs the downfalls of using the sprinklers but i do
try to limit the amount of overhead watering that i do overall and yes if you're wondering
even with the size of my gardens i still water by hand now i never water my in-ground beds by hand
but often if my raised beds or my containers just need a spot water it's quicker to do it
by hand than lugging a hose around or hooking up sprinklers and it's a good job to give to the kids
so we have a couple tools for hand watering that i really really like first is this metal watering
can that was a hand-me-down to me i think it's been around for about 500 years it's been run
over by a truck and it is still the best watering can that i have ever found and i have gone through
a lot of watering cans i think it's a three gallon which is just about perfect it's balanced and it
has the perfect nozzle in that it releases the perfect amount of water even for young seedlings
i have searched and searched and short of ordering something directly from england i cannot find
a comparable watering can so if anyone in the states knows where i can find one of these
please share with me a second hand watering tool i've been loving is this hose and sprayer from
green mount now they actually sent this one to me to try and i told them up front that i was dubious
as to whether this would ever replace my old favorite which was a watering wand from
am leonard they said to go ahead and give it a try anyway and i did and i actually have been using
this all the time now this is one that you just attach to the end of a hose what's nice is it has
this i think they call it like a fireman's lever that shuts the thing on and off and it's also got
multiple sprayer settings anywhere from like a jet stream to a really light shower so whatever you're
watering or cleaning it's basically got a setting for my son in particular loves the jet setting
because i think he's pretending to be a fireman and i find myself using the shower
or the soaker setting all of the time and if you're interested in one of these for yourself
check out the link in the description to this video because there's a 10 off link for this green
mount sprayer nozzle and then we do have this rain barrel system set up on the back of the barn
now these style tanks are really nice and often you can get them for free or cheap from local
farmers we've typically gotten them from farmer friends sometimes you can find them for sale on
like craigslist or facebook marketplace but a lot of times farmers will get things like
molasses for their cattle in these you can just rinse them out and repurpose them as
rainwater reservoirs and setting them up in an elevated way like this helps to get
enough water pressure that i can run a hose out to the garden and water that way
now we have two right now with the plan to add more and this one i don't have a hose attachment
on i use this to fill up my watering cans or buckets or the chicken water things like that
the other one i do have a heavy duty hose attached to and that one runs far enough that i can water
all of the containers in the front of my garden we used a rain barrel conversion kit that was offered
through our county soil and water conservation department i think it i think it was about 35
for the do-it-yourself converter kit but a lot of other places have similar kits for sale and if you
don't need something this big the same thing can be done with something like these 55 gallon tubs
and one of my many hope to do someday projects is to figure out some kind of a pump system for these
that i could actually get enough water pressure to run a sprinkler using these water reservoirs we'll
see if i can get to that and if anybody's done a system set up like that i'd love to hear from you
and i did promise to share with you a few tricks that i use to limit the amount of watering i'm
having to do here in the garden the first is not so much a trick as it is a benefit of having a
specific soil type now if you've watched any of my previous videos you may know that i have clay soil
and i tend to whine about it a lot but the one blessing of clay soil is that it does hold on to
water now sometimes that can be a bad thing but in the middle of july and august when there's no rain
it is actually a blessing the true trick that i use to limit the amount of watering
is that i rely heavily on mulches now whether that's a mulch like straw hay grass clippings
leaf mulch or a green living mulch in the way of cover crops they all serve the same purpose which
is to keep the soil from drying out quickly and i mulch everything walkways up around the plants
in my beds pretty much anywhere there is exposed soil it is getting a mulch and that drastically
cuts down on how quickly my soil dries out and therefore how often i have to water so to give
you an idea in my in ground beds back here i am typically only watering when i transplant
seedlings and then maybe one to three times through the months of july and august when it gets
really hot and dry here now with the raised beds and containers i do have to water those much more
frequently maybe once a week during the summer because they dry out so much more quickly so that
pretty much sums up what i am doing to keep my gardens watered i'd love to hear from you what are
you doing to keep your plants thirst quenched and if you found today's video helpful please consider
subscribing to my channel growfully with jenna thanks for watching and i'll see you next time
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