Conserving water

Did you know that hand-watering around the root systems of your plants is very efficient? When we decide to turn on the irrigation for 30 minutes and walk away, flooding around the plants and in the landscape bed occurs. The water sits for a while, some of it getting absorbed and some of it evaporating. 

The irrigation watered the entire area of the bed, while hand-watering just watered the root systems. Water is wasted. Watering when the plants need it the most is also more efficient. The plants will use water distributed efficiently, rather than in irrigation, where watering three times a week allows water to infiltrate past a plant’s roots because they do not need it. Watering deeply allows the water to keep the roots deeper into the soil and not need constant watering because roots are reaching for the water at the surface of the soil.

Conserving water helps save the precipitation we do get. In a good year, our annual precipitation is about 17-19 inches and in a bad year, our annual precipitation is about 7-9 inches. The less lawn area we must water, the more water we can conserve. One cubic foot of Kentucky Blue grass gets 20 gallons of water during one irrigation cycle of watering once in the week. If you had just 1,000 square feet of lawn, that equals 20,000 gallons of water. Watering up to three times in a week over that 1,000 square feet of lawn is the equivalent of 60,000 gallons of water per week. We are consuming more water than we get annually.

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