Watering: Protecting Your Landscape Investment

One way to combat the impending drought is to have already filled your landscaping beds with plants that are drought tolerant. Grasses, sedum, and yucca just to name a few, are the types of plants that will survive this weather with little assistance. Most everything else is going to need your help.
Last year we had extreme conditions, record-breaking rain for a long period followed by a long drought, then erratic winter temps. These conditions led to the death of many plants. If you are like me, you may have either given your trees and shrubs some tough love last year, thinking they would pull through or perhaps it didn’t even cross your mind that you needed to water your landscape during the drought. The stress proved to be too much for several of my shrubs and a 9’ arborvitae that I had planted 3 years ago, though I didn’t see the signs until late winter.

Evergreens are typically pretty tolerant, and slow to show stress symptoms, but we are over 3 weeks with little or no rain, depending on your location. So you really have to water everything that you don’t want to risk losing including evergreens. They usually don’t show signs of stress until it is too late. Watering can be tricky and not as fun as TV commercials make it look. Here are some tips to help you protect your landscape investment, especially now when plants that survived last year are once again being put through extremely stressful conditions.

1) For one, you can’t just turn the hose on and spray your plants for a few minutes every day. Over-the-top watering encourages fungus leaf spots, already a problem in the Spring. It is best to water your plants deeply and less often at a very slow trickle. This allows the water to
thoroughly soak down into the ground.

2) When we say to water slowly, we mean placing the end of the hose at the base of one tree for an hour or better where the water is barely running out. When you dump a large amount of water on very dry, hard clay in a short period of time, the tendency is to run horizontal across the surface, never penetrating the ground deep enough to get to the roots. However, when you use the slow trickle method each drop is absorbed deeper and deeper and you get the water to travel down vertically, where it needs to be without wasting your time & energy. Each plant should get this treatment weekly. For smaller shrubs a half hour should suffice.

3) If you have an irrigation system, be careful not to overwater your plants in an attempt to step up the water going on your lawn. You can use a rain gauge to measure how much is getting on your plants, but read it promptly before evaporation gives a false reading.

4) Reduce other stress on your plants by controlling
diseases and insects. Mulch and groundcover also help retain moisture around your plants.