How to Water a Garden

I'm Doug Smiddy of Smiddy's Gardening Services here on behalf of expertvillage.com and welcome to my garden. Today we're here to talk about low maintenance gardening. Now we're going to talk about watering your garden. Usually mother nature provides and in general plants want about 1 inch of water per week. But sadly mother nature don't always come through, so she needs a little help. Now don't wait until your plants get all wilty because that's just going to put them through stress and they're not going to produce as much whether it's a vegetable or a flower. So what I like to do is go out to the garden and give my soil a finger as I like to say. It's basically just going out and sticking your finger into the soil about 1 inch deep. If you can feel moisture down there, in other words if it feels like a squeezed out sponge then it doesn't need water even though it may be dry on top. If you over water your plants you tend to get root rot, so again give your soil a finger it's one of the best ways to tell if it needs water or not. Alright, now I've got my finger down about an inch there, it feels a little dry I'm going to give it a little water. Now, the best time of day to water if you can is in the morning. The main reason for that is you can get the plants saturated with water and the sunlight during the day is going to evaporate the water on the leaves. So you want to really just try to replicate a rain storm. Instead of trying to saturate one area and then moving on, give the garden just a good light spraying all around and just keep going over it back and forth just like the rain would fall on your plants that's quiet simple. Now, as you can see I'm going over it a little bit of a time on each section of the garden and as you can see it's starting to puddle around the plants, that's around when you want to stop. You don't want to give it too much. Again, if your garden is small and manageable it's better to do it by hand than setting out a lawn sprinkler. So pretty much we've given the plants a good dousing of water by the base of the plants and we've given it a good folier spray just like it would happen in a rain storm simple as that.