Hi! I am Tim MacWelch of Earth Connection School of Wilderness Survival and Ancient Skills near Fredericksburg, Virginia. This is our video series on Organic Gardening.
In this clip, we're going to talk about how to water your garden and when. Very simple and easy, you want to water your garden in the morning, every chance you get, unless it's a rainy day or some other rain is forecasted for later in the day.
Watering in the morning will give your plants a chance to dry off during the day. So they don't sit their wet overnight, every night, growing different kinds of fungus, which would kill them.
Most big golf courses do this simple trick of watering every morning and only in the morning to keep their lawns looking as nice as they do. So, this is something we can employ in the garden.
So, we can water by hand with a simple nozzle like this, and that works well enough. But we've got to be here to do this. And there is a lot of overspray, there is waste of water.
Now this certainly works, and this can get you started. Or if you are using container gardens, this is probably what you'll want to do. It's just watered by hand. Make sure every little guy gets some water.
Typically, you want to soak the beds deeply. A little bit of water just on the top, isn't quite enough. You want to spread the water around, and water the bed deeply. So that the roots get water too, not just the top soil.
Now, if we did not want to get the foliage of our plants wet, and in the case of tomatoes, we certainly don't want to get the leaves wet, because that would be an open door for fungus to come in.
So, we can water just the soil. Well, how do you do that? You use a soaker hose. Make sure all your connections are always clean when you put your hoses together. We are going to screw on to our solid hose, a section of soaker hose. This is laid on the ground, all in and between your plants, going back and forth in your garden bed, and as this fills up with water and pressure, the water dribbles out or squirts out gently throughout the entire hose, providing an even consistent moisture for your garden beds.
So, you can see the water spraying everywhere out of the soaker hose here. The more of these you have in a row, the lower the water pressure is, because it's going out of a lot more holes in more hoses. So, it doesn't squirt out quite as aggressively as this, if you have several strung together, and you can certainly do that.
One garden hose will feed a dozen or more soaker hoses, and all we would do is lay these down throughout our garden bed, and it's a little messy but it's actually kind of easier to do it while it's running, because there is weight in the hose. The weight of the water keeps the hose in place.
So, you'll get sprayed in the face a couple of times. We'd just carefully lay this down throughout your bed and you can use little landscape staples to pin this down and make it stay in just the right spot. So, we just use those simple little landscape staples and staple it down here and there, and specially where it turns and comes back. Put a few staples in that turn and it will stay where it's supposed to stay.
Now, if we really want to get fancy, we can buy a timer, which is very simple and effective. We've put a couple of batteries in our timer, and that goes in the line between our garden hose and our soaker hose, and our timer can be set to water or vegetables automatically everyday, every other day, every 3 days, or once in 7 days, and it can go for 10 minutes, or it can go for 2 hours.
Different models of timer can be set to different specifications. But that's pretty easy and specially if you have a big garden or maybe you plan on going somewhere, you don't have to bother anybody to water your garden for you. Just set the timer, and forget about it, and your garden will take care of itself, at least from the watering end.
So, that's how and when to water your garden. Our next clip is going to be how to make Compost.
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