How should you water your garden and how often? Watering your plants too often makes them look great, but it can weaken their root systems and cause lots of problems. Depending on conditions, for most people,...
Depending on conditions, for most people, I think watering about every three to four days for the first season is pretty good. After that, usually once a week. Most meteorologists actually include a watering schedule as part of their forecast and they usually won't even mention it if we're getting ample rain. But when we start getting into dryer spells, then they'll say, "Well, we haven't had rain for two weeks, so here's the watering schedule for the city of Austin." That's a great service that many news channels are offering now to help people know when it's a good time to water.
Typically, after plants have been in the ground for awhile and they're established, watering about every five or six days is good. That may mean that at the end of that fifth or sixth day, your plants may be a little wilted and may not be as perky and fresh-looking as they were. But, particularly here in Central Texas, we're protective of our aquifers, and of the amount of water we have because when we do get into a drought, the water supply does get limited. And honestly, letting your plants get a little stressed like that between waterings makes for a sturdier plant. When you water something, soak it really well and then let it dry out. The plant will use up the water around it first, and then if the plant can sense that there's water just a little bit outside its reach, that triggers it to send roots and look for that water. If you keep the roots wet all the time, that plant has no reason to try to find more water, so it will never really establish a root system. Particularly with lawns, I still run into people that let their sprinklers run for five minutes every day. What that encourages is a very shallow root system on your lawn. And the biggest downside to that, besides the water usage, is when, let's say, you go on vacation for a week and a half, and the day you leave the power goes off and your sprinkler system goes down. You're going to come back to a dead lawn because it's used to that water every day. I usually recommend getting on about a three- to five-day cycle of lawn watering for a longer period of time - deeper watering - but letting it dry out between. And if you get into the same situation, you may come back and your lawn may not look great, but it's probably not all going to be dead from lack of water because it's built a deeper, stronger root system. And the same thing applies to any kind of plant. The more you give it a good soaking and then allow it to dry out, the better root system it's going to establish.
