10 Ways to Water Your Garden Better

Sunlight, air, nutrients and water. Those are the things that a plant needs to survive. Mess up on any of them and your garden is going to perform worse as a result. So in today's video, I collected a bunch of your watering questions and we're going to rapid fire through some of my best tips, some mistakes to avoid and some of my favorite watering tools. Kevin Espiritu here from Epic Gardening where it's my goal to help you grow a greener thumb and not fry or rot out your plants. So I've done a video on five watering mistakes to avoid. Check that out. It goes into detail on some of the classic mistakes that you can make. But in this video, it's kind of a smorgasbord of a bunch of different tips, tricks, tutorials, all sorts of things to help you manage the watering of your garden a lot better. So without further ado, cultivate that Like button for Epic Perfectly Moist Soil and let's get into the video. Let's get a couple of basics out of the way. The best time to water your garden, really it's when the plant needs it. So if it's wilting and it really is in need of a drink, even if it's high noon, then give it water no matter what. But if you have the opportunity, I would go with early morning, then evening and then in the middle of the day or just whenever the plant needs it. The reason why is because early in the morning you're going to allow the plant to suck, there's monarchs flying all around me and a beetle. Wow. Some life here in the garden. But if you water early in the morning, you give the plant time to suck that water all up into its tissues, stay nice and turgid or stable, nice and sturdy throughout the day. And you just give it the ability to withstand the heat of the day. It's actually quite a heat wave right now. And so it's a really good time to water. Evening is sort of the same. Just you want to make sure you don't overwater in the evening. You don't want water like sitting on the leaves overnight, for example. And then, you know, in the middle of the day, completely fine to water if you need to. It does not harm your plants to water over the top as far as burning the plant. A lot of people say, Oh, it's going to sunburn the plant if you do that. It's not true. So don't worry about that. The next question has to do with running drip irrigation and how long to water if you're on drip. So let's turn this on and I'll show you. With drip, based on a million different factors really changes the amount of time that you'd want to water. It's based on the type of tape that you're using, the emitters, the output rate of the emitters. So that can get very complex. So I would say figuring out when to run your drip and how long is basically determined on observation. So I have the garden running right now. I can see some of these bags are starting to already drain out. So what I can do with these adjustable drippers is actually move them slightly so I can titrate that one down so that one waters a little bit slower than the rest so that they all are getting the ample amount of water. So I'm not flooding one and underwatering another. So that's a really good idea. I have a whole video on that as well. But really it's just see how long it takes for most of your containers or your bed to get amply wet. Make a note of that and then run it on that cycle in the future. So this lime tree here does not need this much water compared to other plants. So I'll just titrate this down a little bit. Now this one's flowing at a lower rate and the rest are completely fine. For example, over here in the bok choy bed, I can move this a little bit if I want to, but we're getting pretty good coverage here and these are going to need a lot of water. So I'm going to keep it at this rate. Also, this bag's a lot bigger. So I wouldn't want to cut it off like that. I really want this to be full stop open and ready to water. Now out here in the in-ground bed or even in the raised bed, it's a different equation because you're actually applying the water to the garden if you're hand watering. So then the question remains, how do I know how much I should water? Well, it's going to depend of course on a lot of different things. For example, take these tomatoes here. Tomatoes benefit a lot more from a deep inconsistent watering than a little bit of water every single day. So I'm going to show you how I water these tomatoes and then I'll show you how I water the corn up there and how that differs. So I'm using a water wand here, which I can talk about in a second. But the first thing I want to do is just moisten all the soil because if it's dry, it's been dry for a while, you want to give it a little bit of a hydration before you start pouring it on. So let's do that. I call it the water, wait, water move. The water, you can see this water is starting to run. It needs some time to actually moisten up the soil. There, it's starting to get in. Now I can come in with a deeper water. Okay, here we go. Especially if you're using a water wand that puts out quite a bit of water at one time, unlike a little shower hose, then it's a lot easier to actually get the water into the subsoil if you wait a little bit instead of just dumping it all on at once. And with tomatoes, it's a really good idea to water around as well, deep and wide roots. And so watering anywhere from one to two feet, even around your tomatoes is going to be a great idea. So how do I now know if I watered enough? Well, what I can do is just brush away my mulch and stick my finger down in here and take a little pull away. And if I take a look, I've got water down at least four or five inches, if not more. So I've given it a nice deep water. That's a success. Now again, you want to just make a note of how long that took to get there and then replicate that the next time you water. There's our example of tomatoes, a plant that wants to be watered deeply, but not necessarily every single day. Now something like corn, remember, that's a much shallower root system. Beans again, also a shallow root system. And they will suffer quite a bit from not having water in that shallow root system. So you may want to come in with something like this and water more often once, even twice a day, especially if you're in a heat wave and just making sure those roots stay consistently moist. And this is a situation in which you see on the rest of my beds, I've got a bunch of straw mulch down. I need to put straw mulch down on this as well. The more shallow the root system is, the more sensitive it is to underwatering, the more result you're going to get and more benefit from having a nice layer of mulch on top of your bed. And so I'm making a little bit of a mistake here in not doing that, which I will remedy as soon as I finish watering this up. Before we get to some of my favorite gardening tools for watering, a final note as far as frequency and how often to water and how to just know the answer there. And there isn't a secret to knowing the answer. It's developing the gardener's eye. And so things you have to consider would be container size, temperature, the actual plant, what phase the plant is in. You know, tomatoes early on versus tomatoes later on. I mean, guess which one probably needs a little bit deeper of a drink, right? Even the same type of container. I've got a grow bag here doing some peppers and basil. I have another grow bag behind me here. It's a hundred gallons doing Japanese pickling cucumbers, Thai giant hot chilies and flowers. And so that's going to be pulling a lot of water, but there's also five times more soil in that. And way less of that soil is exposed to the edges of the grow bag. So it's not evaporating as much. And so there's all sorts of little factors to consider. At the same time, that can sound very complex and intimidating. Whereas just studying the plant, looking for signs of under or over watering is a great idea. So here's a good example. I mean, these cucumbers, they definitely have some issues, but it's not a watering related issue. The leaves nice and cupped upwards. If I press down on them and mess around with them, they flip right back to their normal shape. It's well watered. It doesn't have any water stress at all. And so when I start to see these cucumber leaves start to flop a little bit, even the stems will lose their rigidity and they'll start to flop as well. That's a sign that I've missed my window. And so you kind of always want to be scanning, like looking at the leaves of your plants. Cucumbers obviously are a great one because it's a very big leaf and it shows water stress very easily. But even things like peppers, you know, even crops like peppers will start to show water stress. So here's an example of one that's completely fine. These are the Thai giant hot chilies. Tons and tons of chilies are coming out of these ones. So these look great. The nice dark green color. Again, no wilting, nice rigidity on the leaf. Let's go take a look at a habanero that is showing water stress. So this habanero here, it's very easy to see the water stress. Curling leaves, very droopy, very floppy. And quite honestly, just looking kind of sad. So I need to give this one a drink and it will come back. But if you let this persist for too long, you will cause irreparable damage to the plant. Here's an example of one I watered a little bit earlier just to show you how quickly they will come back. So there's still a little floppiness and droopiness, but you can see, these leaves are starting to fill back up. The stems are starting to get more stable. So you can revive these. You just really have to keep an eye on it. I want to talk about a few watering tools that will make your life a whole lot easier. Now, this is not ideal because at the new house I'm at right now, I have a single hose bib for the whole property. So I'm doing some creative stuff, but hopefully that lets you get an idea of what you can do. So right now I just have this going into a splitter. The splitter, of course as the name implies, will split water into two different streams. So I've got two different hoses. One goes to the front, one goes to the back, and you'll see what we do with the one on the back. It's pretty cool. But you can just turn these on and off. So I can have a zone on over here. I can have both on if I want to. I can have both off if I want to. So this is sort of the first setup. Splitters are super cheap and you can find them pretty much anywhere. The next tool I have for you is an attachment less than a tool. So from your hose to whatever watering implement you have up here, typically you just screw that in. But what you have here is a quick connect. So I can pull this down, pop this out just like that. And if I want to throw my water wand on, which is fantastic for reaching hard to reach spots, a nice stream of targeted water. If you want to water just at the roots of a plant for example, then I can just boom, boom, pop that right in and I'm good to go. I didn't have to unscrew and screw. Nice tight seals. This one even has its own on off as well as this one over here. And this one's got a bunch of different sprays. And so flexibility in watering, cause I don't know about you, but where I live water is pretty expensive. So I don't want to waste it. I want to make sure that the water is going exactly where I want it in the amounts that I want it. And you know, even something as simple as a quick tool like this, which are very, very cheap, just a quick connect male here. And then the female right here, boom, and it's done. As I mentioned on my property right now, I have one hose bib. So I've done some splitters like you saw. I've also run it into drip like you saw earlier in the video. But I've also split that drip line into another hose back here. Cause what I was having to do was just like lug a hose everywhere. I daisy chained two hundred foot hoses together so I could go anywhere on the property with about 200 feet of hose. But then you're getting kinks, you're getting all sorts of annoying things. I was hitting my garden edging and pavers and couldn't get it around it and would do that thing where you like take the hose and loop it and have the, have the wave go and like get it over something. Not the best use of time and probably just not the best use of a hose. So what I did is I grabbed one of these bad boys. In fact, Hoselink sent this out. This is called a Hoselink. They're the sponsor of the video. So thank you to them for sending this out. But this really is going to change the game for my watering. So it's a retractable hose reel, which to be honest, it's very handy. It's like way more handy than you would imagine it to be. So I want to show you a couple of things about it that I really, really like. First of all, the fact that it has its own version of a quick connect. So this is on right now. So let's do this. Let's see if I get splashed. But you can do that and you get water coming out. You can turn that water off and I can switch on any other implement I want right here. So if I wanted to put a watering wand on, a spray nozzle, literally anything, I can do that just by boom, zoom, and then putting it back on, right? And then if I want to turn it on, I do this and I'm working, right? But that's really just the bare bones basics of what makes this so cool. So I'm going to show you how it actually works. So the installation process is really simple because all you're doing is you're taking the hose mount and just screwing it in. I put it into my four by four fence post here. Then you just slot in the hose link and it can rotate freely about 180 degrees, slightly more. So the hose actually follows you where you're walking in the garden. So check this out, this apricot tree right here. I want to water it. In the past I had to make a hose magically get over here somehow without getting caught on stuff. I want to show you how it works with the hose link. So now that I'm out here, if I let go, it actually stays. So it click stays and then I can just hand water as much as I want. If I needed to have it come out even further, no big deal. Just give it a quick pull out, give myself a little bit more room. Again, it clicks and stays out. I can do my watering task perfectly fine. Let's imagine I finished that. Now, how do I get it back? Well, all you do is give it a gentle tug, just a tiny little tug here, and then guide it back by hand. Because I have gardens all around my property right now, it's been really handy to come out, like for example, with these dragon fruit and some of these pineapple propagations I have, and just run a hose straight over to it instead of filling up a bucket and watering it or dragging a hose around weird corners. As you can tell, I'm a massive fan of the hose link. Anywhere you have the ability to mount it and connect some sort of waterline to it, you basically can extend out. This is an 82 foot model. They have different lengths, but you can extend out from there. So if you think about your irrigation at your property, what you can do is you can throw some fence posts up like a four by four, put a little concrete in the hole and just mount this somewhere where you need about 82 foot radius for watering. So it's super, super handy. I don't know how I hadn't heard of it before, but again, thanks to Hose Link for sponsoring the video and sending this out. A really common question is whether it makes sense to water using your city water for a couple of reasons. What if it's really hard water? Ours actually is here. We're about 400 to 450 parts per million. So it's quite hard water, but we also have chlorinated water. So the question is, does that harm the plant? It's not really going to harm the plant so much as it would harm the bacterial microbial life within the soil that you're trying to really cultivate so that they can mobilize the nutrients for the plants. And so for that reason, some of my really good friends in the, in the natural farming world who are really trying to go as with nature as possible, throw a chlorine filter on their city line to remove that so that they don't have to worry about that. That's something that I'm going to be doing as well. But the short answer is your plants will still grow without doing that. But it is sort of an extra step that you can consider if you really want to cultivate your soil life. Next question, very understandable one is how to know if you're over or under watering the plant, if it's showing a symptom of some water stress. And you know, it's a good question because they present in kind of the same way. You have a drooping of the leaves, you've got a drooping of the stems, they look sort of wilty. And that makes sense in underwatering because there's not a lot of water in the plant. But in overwatering actually the same thing happens because the soil is full of water, but the roots are starved of oxygen and they're not really able to transport that up into the plant tissue. And so they sort of flop around. Well, to be honest, it sounds like a very simplistic answer, but the best way to know is to just look at the soil and also remember which is more likely to be true. If you've watered it or it's rained a lot recently, then overwatering stress is probably the one that's going on. But if you've forgotten about it for a week or two, well, surprise, surprise, it's probably underwatering. So while they present the same, it really just is using common sense to figure out which of the two is the more likely one. And if you're really, really uncertain, just dig around in the soil and see how it feels. You guys gave me a lot of questions on watering and if I didn't answer yours, drop it in the comment section below. I'll do a followup video on watering sometime soon. But I wanted to leave you with one final tip for watering in extreme heat to make sure you protect your plants. Because right now, I think as of time of release of this video, we're going through kind of a heat wave in the whole country. And so we're all struggling with this issue. One thing that I'll do is number one, water early and deeply in the morning. So I've protected my plants. I've given them all the resources they need at the beginning of the day to try to make it through. But especially on those shallow rooted plants or plants prone to heat stress, you really do want to hit it with a secondary watering, probably sometime in the late afternoon or early evening to make sure that they make it all the way through. Because some of these plants, you know, the soil dries out too long, boom, they're done. Another thing you can do, add a couple inches of mulch on top to protect the soil even more. That's something I'm going to be doing out in my front yard as this heat wave seems to continue. And then another thing you can do is throw some shade cloth on top of your garden beds. And that's going to cut the sun roughly by anywhere from 30 to 70% depending on the type of shade cloth you get, which is going to reduce the amount of transpiration and evaporation that's going on underneath the shade cloth. So that will help you as well. So three final tips for watering in the heat. Again, thanks to Hoselink for sponsoring this video. Super, super handy tool that I expect to be using all the time. You're probably seeing many more installations of the Hoselink on my Epic Urban Homestead. And until next time, good luck in the garden and keep on growing.