Guide on How to Water Your Garden

Watering your plants right is one of the most essential elements of gardening. Join our gardening expert as she demonstrates the finer points of watering both established and container grown plants, explaining the right watering technique to help ensure your plants develop deep, strong root systems. You'll also get to know about the best time for watering and what all can go wrong if you water the plants the wrong way or at the wrong time of the day.

Hi, I'm Debbie from Spring Hill and today we're going to talk about one of the most essential parts of gardening, which is watering. Now, for container gardens, you want to make sure that they get water every single day. Now, if you live in an area that has a lot of rain, you'll probably be getting a lot of help from above, but you want to make sure that you're getting a good soaking every day. Now, with your containers, make sure that you have drain holes at the bottom because it's essential for the health of your plants that it waters all the way through. When you're watering your plant, you don't want to just water the surface of the soil. Keep that hose in there until you see it coming all the way through the pot. Now that might take a little bit of patience, but it'll be worth the effort when you see your beautiful flowers that will continue to bloom for you throughout the season. Now, for established plants in your garden, you don't want to water them every day. What you want to do instead is give them a nice deep soaking about once a week, maybe twice in the summer months. Now what this will accomplish, is it will encourage the roots to actually reach down into the moist soil for the water. So that's going to give you a stronger root system. Now, the rule of thumb for established plants, is about one inch of water a week. Well, how do you know how much one inch is? The easiest way is just to go out and get yourself a rain gauge or even just an old coffee can and put it right in the middle of your garden to see how much water you're getting. Now, in terms of time of day, it's always best to water your garden as early in the day as possible. If you water in the midday sun, two things will happen - you'll actually be wasting half your water because it will just be evaporating right out, and also, if it's really hot out, you could be contributing to sun scald on your plants. And in the evening, if you water too late, you could be encouraging fungal disease. So, as much as possible, try and water first thing in the morning. And when you're watering, it's important to try and water the base of the plant. If you try and water right on top like this, you see all I'm doing is getting the foliage wet and that's not going to do any good because we're trying to encourage the root system to be stronger. So, instead, what you want to do, like we see, on this rose, is to get down low, use your wand or a soaker hose and get that base of the plant so you're fully watering the root system. So that's it, just a few easy tips, and you'll keep your garden well-watered and beautiful all season long.