Conservation is one of the best solutions to reduce your water bills and reduce problems with your landscape plants and turfgrass during our current dry spell. Watering, fertilizing and maintaining your landscape properly can reduce your water bill by as much as 30 percent. Rather than going to extreme measures and not watering, try another approach that will give desired results and save water. I am sure there are some of you that have looked at your water bill with eyes wide open and said “OUCH!”. Now let’s see if we can help you not make some of the mistakes and save water and money.
The first thing is learning to identify symptoms of drought stress. Look for discoloration and wilting. Leaves can also roll up or close in the heat of the day. This can be true for both turfgrass and landscape plants. With turfgrass, a step test help in predicting moisture need. Grass blades that have adequate water will spring back up. If there is a lack of water, the blades of grass stay compressed from the compaction of walking across the lawn.
Walk across the lawn for about ten paces. Turn around and see if your footprints are still visible. If your footprints are visible from the starting point, water within 24 hours. With landscape plants, temperatures above 98 degrees can cause wilting during the heat of the day. If the plants look fine in the morning and again later in the evening (not wilting), then the plants are getting enough water from the soil.
Watering too little too often or too much can increase susceptibility to insects, fungus and root problems. Watering small amounts with more frequency causes turfgrass to develop shallow roots. With landscape plants, shallow watering will only impact the roots for a short period of time and then evaporates with the heat. Thus, causing permanent damage to the plants systems and ultimately resulting in dieback or plant death. On the other hand, excessive watering will result in run-off (especially with clay soils) or excessive soil moisture that leads to lack of oxygen for roots. Regardless, both methods can increase susceptibility to insects, fungus and disease. So, watering deeply and infrequently is your best and most productive option. On another note, use irrigation devices that produce large drops or heavy streams of water. Fine mists and small drops of water have a greater chance of evaporating and not making their way down into the soil.
So, how much water do you apply and for how long do you set the timer? Research shows that turf requires 1 inch of water per week to sustain healthy vigorous growth. With that said, if it rains 2 inches on any given day, we technically should not have to water for 2 weeks. You will notice I said “technically”. Other factors include evaporation, wind, soil type and plant water-use requirements just to name a few. Now back to the initial question. An easy way to determine how long you will need to water is to perform an irrigation audit. This can be done with an irrigation system or with hose-end devices.
Randomly place a couple of coffee cans or rain gauges in the yard (or irrigation station) and measure how much water is accumulated in a predetermined amount of time. This will allow you to gauge how long to water each time you irrigate. Established grasses with good root systems should be able to survive at least three days between water events.
After performing an irrigation audit you should be able to increase your conservation effort without sacrificing your lawn.
Cutting back on fertilization can also reduce water consumption. Applying fertilizer in the spring and fall will generally keep things healthy and attractive. Fertilizing during the heat of the summer or during droughts, especially with high nitrogen fertilizer, will increase growth but increases water consumption. However, with the current stress level in plants, fertilizing will only increase stress and ultimately result in more susceptibility to problems.
Lastly, avoid cutting back landscape plants until temperatures cool down and normal rainfall relieves plant stress. Hopefully plants will start to see some reprieve soon and can start the recovery process.
How to preform an irrigation audit
An irrigation audit involves inspection of all irrigation heads to determine that all function properly. Check each nozzle to make sure they are not clogged or that grass or other obstructions do not impede the distribution of water. After inspecting the nozzles, set out a series of cups in a grid pattern over the field or a specific zone of the irrigation system. Next, turn on the sprinklers for a specified amount of time. After the irrigation is off, measure the amount or depth of water in each cup or can. When all cups are collected, find an average amount or depth of water in each cup and use that to determine the application rate per hour.
Example:
5 measuring cups were used and the irrigation system was run for fifteen minutes. All cups were measured as follows:
0.25″ + 0.3″ + 0.27″ + 0.22″ + 0.3″ = 1.34″ ÷ 5 cups = 0.268″ avg. in fifteen minutes.
0.268″ per 15 minutes = x”/60 minutes, x = 1.072″ per hour.
Don’t forget to send your garden questions to Plant Answers at 9020 Airport Rd., Conroe TX 77303 or e-mail me at mpotter@ag.tamu.edu.
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