Watering your garden & growing potatoes & onion!

How often should I water? According to my New Western Garden book written by Sunset, this is the most comment question asked by the novice gardener. And of course, it’s not one that is easily answered. There are variables such as the needs of the plant, its age, the season, weather, nature of the soil and the method of application. To ignore these variables and simply water by calendar or clock may subject your garden to drought or drowning. One thing we do know is frequent light sprinkling and frequent heavy soaking alike are bad. Water thoroughly and infrequently is the way to go, or I have always put it – water less and water deep! Which means – when you water think about the roots of the plants. If you sprinkle are you getting to the roots? Or just wetting the plant and dirt? Really you don’t want to wet the plant itself too often and if you do make sure it’s in the early morning so it will have time to dry out during the day before night. If your garden is wet at night that is how disease can begin. My Dad says once every 2-3 weeks it’s good to rinse off your plants to remove dirt and bugs etc… but do it early in the day. Right now I water only soil that looks/feels dry and skip those that either do not need a lot of water (like my Rosemary that I usually end up over watering and killing). I also try to avoid using a hose when watering during these early spring days, to avoid over watering. Using a watering can saves a ton of water and helps you avoid wetting everything. When it starts to get read hot outside I will water a few times a week but make sure you have a nice little moat around your plant that can hold and collect the water and allow it to eventually sink down into the roots. A little water only wets a little soil. It takes about 15 minutes of watering to soak down 12” – on the other hand if you are trying to water a tree, especially if you are fertilizing it – you might have to soak it for 6, 8 or ten hours depending on how large it is. I am going to include some links below that have more in depth information about watering since it’s such a great subject. There will be no watering for Long Beach locals today since it rained! I might have collected a tiny bit in my new rain barrel!

PS I enjoy the BYU Channel about gardening on Verizon FIOS and the Master Gardner said, and I always say this to my plants: “Everyone deserves a drink of water after a long, hot day.” Take care of yourself and your plants.

Determine How Much Water your Garden Needs

How Much Should I water?

Here are some pics of the onions in my garden beginning to sprout! This is so cool 🙂 Since they don’t take up much room and I had some extra bulbs I doubled up the amount of onions planted – so YaY.

Also I wanted to include a few photos of the potatoes because I see a sprout. So with the potatoes we put a few under the sink in a paper sack and let them sprout real good for about 2 weeks. Then we took them out and cut them up just making sure each piece has a root or eye on it. We then left them out on the counter for a couple days to let them harden a bit. Then we planted them in the garden in hills. Think of the hills as triangles. The potato itself goes about half way so the flower can grow up and out of the hill and potatoes can grow down below — sounds interesting we’ll have to see. Here are some pics and if you want more info I blogged about this a few weeks ago.

Here is a better shot of the potato hills:

Until next time 🙂 what are you growing?