In our arid environment, watering is a challenge, but understanding your plants watering needs and the basic principles of irrigation will lead to much happier plants. Most of us in the southwest depend on a drip irrigation system which is a fantastic way to water if it s used correctly. This system puts water directly to each individual plant via an emitter which, if done right, is an incredible way to conserve our precious water.
I use a general rule of thumb to determine the emitter size each individual plant needs when being planted: the pot size the plant comes in is the emitter size needed. For instance, if you purchased a 1 gallon perennial then it will need a 1 gallon emitter, a 5 gallon plant will get a 5 gallon emitter and so on. Again, this a very general rule and may change with certain plant varieties.
Another big challenge for many is how long to run your drip system. The easy answer is one hour and here is why: emitters release a certain amount of water per hour, if they don t run for an hour your plant is likely not getting the water it needs to thrive. Seems simple, right? You would be surprised how many folks run their systems a half hour or less. Now there may be special circumstances to running a system for a shorter period of time, but one should run it more than once in a day in shorter bursts of time to still get the suggested amount of water to each plant.
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Our soil is caliche… could make pottery x it?! Over the years of amending the soil with kitchen scraps (the darn garbage even grows: we get loads of big potatoes that grow from the peelings I compost in the garden soil!)& leaves & sand hauled from our son’s sandy soil on the Westside that has volcanic material naturally mixed in it .. we now have wonderful garden soil. Our garden is on soaker hoses on an automatic timer & the 22 tomato, 200 chili & bell peppers, squash, watermelon & bush beans seem to thrive with little care. The plants are all grown from seed we grow in the garage in home made insulated long boxes with heat blankets under trays of water/fertilizer & under grow lights on a timer & in Park’s ‘sponges’(love those sponges!). Rarely lose a single plant this way. I also use the liter soda plastic bottles & the purchased drip tips around the tomato plants & fertilize them by filling those plastic bottles. Though a small City lot, we can sure harvest a lot from really intensified gardening using good soil, watering & fertilizing. We have Fuji, Cameo & Haralson dwarf apple trees, Weeping Santa Rosa plum, Garden (dwarf) Bing cherry & dwarf apricot & peach trees, Red Flame & Concord grapes & also 40 + yr. old pomegranates grown x seed & a fig tree x a Roswell relative’s cutting. My pride though are the 27 peony bushes, rhubarb & a Staghorn Sumac tree that came from Iowa over 40 + years ago also & have done well here in NM.
What I like about gardening in NM is that you grow only what you want to grow… the lack of rain keeps the weeds controllable! The dill & groundcherries though sure tend to be a ‘weed’ in the garden but easy to thin out & discard!
Our lawns are a very fine bladed (& soft!) Bermuda of some sort & I don’t use the City watering schedule: ’20 mins. 3 times a week’ & instead water once a week for an hour just using hose end sprinklers. Some one at Rowlands years ago told me that longer watering & less frequently got the water down deeper in the soil & the grass roots went deeper also & conserved water; made sense!
We are able to collect almost 400 gals. of rainwater x the house & shed roofs (when it rains … this year so far the rainbarrels are EMPTY!)& we have the barrels connected in tandem so when one is full the water goes over into the next, & so on.. Those were old olive barrels we purchased x Rowlands & got a City rebate years ago.
A favorite website is Gardenweb.com & have ‘met’ & exchanged ideas & seeds with so many & find the other non-garden forums on this website so helpful & interesting also!