Edited Transcript:
Hi everyone, Terry here from the Smart Garden Show,
Today we cover the “The Smart way to Water your Garden and why it is so important”, so let’s get started.
Water is one of the most critical elements of a vibrant and healthy home garden. Yet, it is often one of the most mismanaged and misunderstood. Most people simply consider the watering of their garden as the act of dosing plants and topsoil with a hose or watering can at relatively regular intervals.
And sure, that sounds simple enough, doesn't it?
What is not apparent in this oversimplification is that most gardens will fail because of this one simple aspect. Every detail in the when and how your garden is watered will dramatically affect if your garden quickly fails, just survives or abundantly thrives. You can have every part of your garden set up perfectly with the very best design and inputs. Still, if you get the watering wrong, it will never be everything it could have been.
This is why we have entirely removed every risk and variable from the watering of our garden. We have learnt the hard way, and over many years that watering is just system critical. A missed day, too much or too little watering, even ineffective watering are all so incredibly detrimental to your garden's performance that it simply can not be left to chance. Because of this, we have invested heavily in a state of the art automated irrigation system for our Smart Garden.
Now, I know people reading this will be thinking, "well, I don't have an irrigation system, and my garden is fine", and I am sure that it is. But what they do not know is just how incredible their garden would be if they had one! They would have healthier plants, bigger yields, less disease, save time, save water, increase their produce's nutritional value, and enjoy larger microbial and worm populations.
I think you get the picture.
Now I have had friends and people who are avid gardens completely dismiss me when I suggest they consider an irrigation system. I am often met with comments like 'but I love watering' or 'I would just prefer to do it myself', and I get that. Watering a garden is amazingly therapeutic, and I am not suggesting that you don't water your garden if you want to. Still, an irrigation system will improve your garden immensely because of one simple fact. It waters your garden better than you can.
So the question becomes, is your therapeutic need to water the priority or is the health and performance of your garden? An irrigation system is never one minute late when it waters your garden. Same time (or times) every single day. It is never an hour late or misses a day (or two). It also delivers precisely the same amount of water to precisely the same place every single day (you try doing that!).
Best of all, your plants LOVE THIS!
Your plants have a whole host of processes to protect them from everything from overwatering to underwatering. These processes take energy away from other processes like growing larger leaves or bearing more fruit. If you miss a day or two of watering, then your plants have gone into defence mode and have started to use up energy maintaining their moisture levels. When you do, guiltily, get around to watering your garden, it takes them a few days to stop those processes and signal to themselves that a lack of water is now not an issue. Suppose that four-day diversion of growth energy to water conservation energy happens several times over the plant's life cycle. In that case, your plants have missed several days and possibly weeks of growth energy that would have produced more food for you.
Did the plant die? Probably not. Is it the very best expression of its ultimate potential? Absolutely not!
It is that ultimate expression of a plant's potential that we are always driving for in a Smart Garden. That is how we get more food with less effort and time. An irrigation system is just a vitally important piece to achieving that.
We also suggest that you use a compensated drip line system that will deliver the water to the root system of your plants. If you can imagine a cross-section of your garden bed, the drip system will wet a large tear dropped shaped watering pattern in the soil. Young plant roots will reach down to this water supply and build stronger and more complex root systems. The more complex the root system, the more nutrient uptake available to the plants.
I really could write another book about the importance of irrigation systems. They just offer such a myriad of benefits to you and your garden that it is really quite incredible. If you spend the time and money getting a good one, it will be one of the best investments you will ever make in your future food security.
I appreciate it is a reasonably complex concept, and there are some pitfalls you need to watch out for, like potentially cancer-causing irrigation parts and equipment, so please post questions or comment below on something you would specifically like answered, and I will get back to you. Or you can email me at contact@thesmartgardenbook.com
So, that covers a bit about watering your garden. Hopefully, I have put a strong case forward or given you some food for thought about irrigation systems in general.
Next week, I will discuss soil moisture content as a kind of Part 2 of this Watering Your Garden episode. We can look at specific parts of an irrigation system as well. So until then, please like, share and shoot us some questions in the comments if you have some, and if you would like more FREE information, please go to our website at thesmartgardenbook.com, and we will send you a load of FREE stuff and we will be honoured by having you be part of our Smart Garden community.
So until next week…
Remember – Our Food, Our Responsibility