Watering Made Easy

Home gardeners know how challenging it can be to keep their plants happily hydrated during the dog days of summer or an extended dry spell. Whether that means wrangling hoses or making several trips with the watering can, watering a garden can be hard work. Thanks to Sam Kuhlman, the Good News Garden--and the gardeners who tend it--will benefit from a new drip irrigation system this season. In early May, Sam devised and installed irrigation hoses that are keeping the garden beds watered with minimal effort.

The rule of thumb is that garden plants should get about an inch of water per week--defined as a one-inch-deep soaking over the entire soil surface. But not all at once. Experts say plants do best when watered three times a week. Early morning watering also is recommended so the foliage can dry off by evening, making it less likely that plants will develop mildew or other diseases. In fact, plants don't absorb moisture through their leaves, but through their roots. That's why watering systems that operate at or below ground level are much more effective and efficient, particularly during the heat of the summer when surface water quickly evaporates.

Sam learned this lesson the hard way after growing carrots in his family's 4-by-8 raised garden bed. The mature carrots were short and fat because the raised bed offered no ground moisture to encourage deeper root growth. The next year, Sam solved the problem by installing soaker hoses at a depth of 8 inches, which resulted in deeper roots and normally shaped carrots.

Sam installed a similar irrigation system in the Good News Garden's raised beds. "I used standard hoses with a three-way splitter to evenly distribute the water pressure in each bed," he explained. If hoses are simply daisy chained together without a splitter, the first bed will get the majority of water, the second bed will get some, but the last bed will receive almost no water.

The splitter and hoses are attached to the church's outdoor faucet, along with a timer provided by gardener Malinda Hamann. When the timer kicks on every day at 6:30 a.m., the hoses soak the beds for 45 minutes. This eliminates the need for a "watering patrol" and also provides water at the optimal time of day.

Which is very good news for the garden, now that temperatures have reached the 90s!