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Watering Systems and Strategies for Gardens and Landscapes
120 Plays2 years ago
Welcome to our latest episode where we dive into the world of efficient watering systems and strategies! Discover the secrets to keeping your garden lush and your landscapes thriving with our tips on irrigation techniques. From drip systems that save water to the best times for watering, we cover it all. Tune in to transform the way you think about hydration for your plants! 🌱💧
Off the Grid: Ultra-low Pressure Drip Irrigation and Rainwater Catchment
Simple Calculations for Small Drip Irrigation Systems
Questions/Comments/Feedback/Suggestions for Topics: hortculturepodcast@l.uky.edu
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Transcript
Introduction to Horticulture Discussion
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to Horticulture, where a group of extension professionals and plant people talk about the business, production, and joy of planting seeds and helping them grow. Join us as we explore the culture of horticulture.
Casual Chat on Morning Drinks
00:00:17
Speaker
Hello, welcome. I have some coffee, so I'm feeling good. How about you guys? Coffee, coffee. I have some throat coat tea still dealing with all of that. I made some weak green tea, so right there with you. Yeah, Echinacea. It's like drinking dirt. I love green tea, but weak green tea is just dirt water. Well, I had full strength already, and I don't want to go two cups because that's... Yum, dirt water. As you're old now. Way past midnight.
Exploring Mushroom Coffee Alternatives
00:00:45
Speaker
Now I thought, wait a minute, dirt water, isn't that like the mushroom coffee or? Mud water. I threw that out there. I knew somebody was going to bite on that. Anybody have any, I don't want to get us off topic, but I'm going to, anybody have any experience with mud water? I've been very curious about this. My sister makes it cool, but she's wrong about a lot.
00:01:10
Speaker
You said not directly. I was like, I watched a guy drink some one time. What kind of things did this person make after consumption? Yeah. There's actually a, there's actually a chemical in green tea that makes you cool. I know it. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, yes.
The Effects and Culture of Tea
00:01:26
Speaker
It's working. It's working. It's called L.
00:01:29
Speaker
hyphen theanine, L theanine, it's able to cross the blood brain barrier. And it's associated with feelings of mild euphoria, boosted mood, etc. And it's been shown, I think, in clinical trial, I don't know, I say I think it's been shown in clinical trials to reduce depression in the subset of people who who took
00:01:54
Speaker
who had enjoyed it. And so I've gotten into tea really heavily in the last couple of months. And there are people who describe the feeling as being like, quote, tea drunk, where you have this kind of like goofy, happy lifted feeling. And I've experienced it myself. Going through some troubling times in the last couple of months, I would drink some and just feel a little reprieve. So if you haven't green tea is the highest in it. But there are other ones that have it too. There's another other other teas too, that have
00:02:22
Speaker
other types of chemicals and within the Eastern tradition of tea, there's a whole notion of like the body effect or the body sensation that's produced by different types of teas. So if you're looking to trip in the most low key, not dangerous way possible, just start drinking some tea.
00:02:42
Speaker
From a horticulture perspective, tea is just fascinating, the culture behind tea, how ancient it is. Yeah. Maybe we should have a tea episode sometime. Camellia sinensis. Yes. Apparently, the ethnobotanists believe that people started by just eating the tea leaves. Then they were like, oh, let's just steep this instead. We got fire now, we can boil some water.
00:03:06
Speaker
Yeah, but black tea, white tea, green tea, they're all camellia sinensis just grown and treated in different ways. Interesting fact. Young trees, younger leaves, older leaves, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But yeah, a tea episode would be good. I wonder if we could get somebody cool to come and talk about it that knows a lot about it. If you know a lot about tea, we're shouting you out. We need some help. We need the tea on tea. Shoot us an email. We could do one about with that regular camellia, that.
00:03:35
Speaker
tea, but also like herbal teas too, could be a vibe. Andy's really big into herbal teas. My- Lexus had the idea of edible plants. This is a tea to me as a form of a, I'm almost in that category, Lexus. Yeah. Sorry, Josh. Yeah. I was just going to say that I don't know a lot about the cultivation of it, but because my first farm job, you know, I was just like there doing things, but we probably had about like 200 row feet of like the tea plant. Oh, you know who might come on?
00:04:06
Speaker
Maybe this should be an after podcast, but just shout out to Among the Oaks Farm over there.
Main Topic: Irrigation and Watering Practices
00:04:14
Speaker
I spent some time abroad with her, but we talked about her on one of our CSA episodes because she runs an herb farm and she does some T-mixes. Sarah, if you're listening, I'm going to call.
00:04:26
Speaker
Where was it? Was that in Georgia, Josh? Yeah, yeah, South Georgia. So like kind of along the coast within like a mile of the shore. Hot, hot heat. Yeah, just I remember harvesting from it because I mean, they were big and we were just we had a dehydrator and kind of a shed for the collection and dehydration of like tea herbs and stuff. And yeah, just cutting the little like tender growth leaves and, you know, dehydrating them and jarring them up.
00:04:50
Speaker
Yeah, I remember doing that a lot. Cool plant. I mean, it's neat. I'm trying to grow, I'm trying to grow yolk and holly this year. I have to check and see if anything's come up yet. But I'm gonna, yeah, exactly. Let's get jerked.
00:05:05
Speaker
Yeah. Nice. That sounds fun. Awesome. I love that. I love these ideas. We're brainstorming, but we're here to talk about irrigation and watering things today, primarily. Plants prefer water to tea, usually. Correct. I mean, you could water that with your tea, so I know that- But electrolytes are what plants crave. Yeah. You can put your tea bags in your warm bin.
00:05:30
Speaker
So if they're the compostable kind. Can you imagine being the worm that comes across the teabag and is like just gets jacked? I guess they probably don't have caffeine receptors, but let's just imagine that they do. Transcendental experience. They're just like, oh my gosh, this is crossing my blood brain barrier. I'm almost nowhere now. What is all this?
00:05:53
Speaker
We are all a worm. Mine mostly survive off of coffee grounds and espresso grounds, so mine are always jacked. They've got a rock band. Smoking cigarettes and reaping SART. When I had a friend who was giving me a bunch for espresso grounds, I just have regular coffee grounds, and I swear I could see a huge difference on how quickly things turned over with the espresso grounds. I was like, oh, I got a beer already? Yeah.
00:06:19
Speaker
So, yeah, getting jacked in there for whatever reason, but you know what else I'm jacked about? Fertilizing and watering. Trying to continue pulling us back to the actual topic, worms eating espresso. They can't have espresso without irrigation water. It's all a circle, folks. It's all a circle. Yeah, we're coming up on that time of year where we had need to be thinking about
00:06:48
Speaker
either getting irrigation set up or plants are going to start needing water here and there. I think sometimes this time of year when plants aren't pushing a ton of leaves yet, they're not using a lot of water. I always heard that people tended to over water their gardens at the beginning of the season and massively under water them as the season went on because we like want to attend the little baby plants and people can drown them and stuff. But we don't want people to do that. We want people to do a great job.
00:07:17
Speaker
which is why we're talking about this now versus when the actual water starts flowing. Right. Irrigation for home gardeners. Uh, I believe it's an interesting topic for me because I believe home gardeners, especially, I mean, commercial horticulture because of the value and the nature of the crop and the scale and you know, the fact that it's commercial. Yeah. Irrigation is a foregone conclusion, but for homeowners, it's always fascinating when I'm visiting or taking phone calls and they mentioned irrigation.
00:07:44
Speaker
because it seems like homeowners are at many different places on the way that they irrigate or don't irrigate.
Comparing Irrigation Practices Across Climates
00:07:51
Speaker
Some homeowners still don't irrigate gardens. I mean, they use a lot of mulches and stuff, but it's a great topic. But I believe there's a lot of variance as far as home scale versus commercial homeowners, you know, as I said, being at many different places in how and when and why they watered.
00:08:09
Speaker
It's funny you mentioned the commercial thing because I know that there have been some extension folks in the surrounding region who have, who have even still had to make a plea for people to think about irrigating their commercial crops, like watermelons. Yeah. I work with people that, you know, on certain crops, certain horticulture crops, they still don't irrigate those regularly. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, you know, it depends on, depending on your goals for the operation, but it is,
00:08:37
Speaker
Yeah, I think there's a lot of people who think of it as putting a plant in the ground and the mother nature and the rain clouds will provide. Right. Which I mean, we're in a good climate, right? So it's like you can get away a lot of the time without irrigating. It's not like we're out west, right? Yep. Yeah, where it's absolutely a must. And not just the climate, we've got a soil that's really good at kind of like not drying out rapidly, like down in
00:09:04
Speaker
Florida, where it's known to rain a lot, if they go like a week without rain, it's drought conditions. Like everything is extremely crunchy and it's gone. Like that sand just doesn't hold on to water the way ours does. Talk about clay and sand, I think a couple of episodes ago. And Josh was repping the sand. I mean, I'm just trying to say I moved away from that to this for a reason. Go toward the clay, Josh. Go toward the clay.
00:09:31
Speaker
Do you, so you all wanted to maybe talk about some of the different systems that people can set up or different kinds of approaches, technologies, whatever, and maybe start there? Well, Alexis had brought up this idea with like pulse irrigation, which I hadn't really heard of and had to look into. And so maybe you could at least talk about that as like, and it can kind of, we can talk about its difference with traditional systems. And walk our way back from the advanced.
00:10:02
Speaker
It's something that I have been hearing about on some other podcasts and from some other big farms. Traitor.
Innovative Irrigation Methods
00:10:10
Speaker
There was only one podcast. The one true bod. But it sounded, sounds like, and I, again, no way an expert on this, but it sounds like it was, the origins are from Australia where they, you know, have a lot of water insecurity issues and, you know, a lot of drought conditions.
00:10:23
Speaker
And this kooky idea from another planet.
00:10:30
Speaker
But they still grow a lot of, they actually grow a lot of cut flower crops, but they grow a lot of different stuff over there. And this idea of pulse watering, which is these short intermittent, you know, like once every hour, twice every hour type thing for 10 minutes, you know, or whatever it depends on your soil, but these like, you know, little 10 minute pulses.
00:10:52
Speaker
every hour of water for primarily their annual crops. But I do think they're doing it on perennials, which I think for our area would not necessarily be the best. But in this case scenario, we'll talk about annuals. So they're giving them this irrigation, which is putting it right into the root zone and not really allowing it to
00:11:13
Speaker
necessarily leach out into like a water table because they're putting it right in the root zone and the short spurts so that the plant is able to just kind of take it right up whenever it needs it and you're using a lot less water. And so I'm seeing something say 20, maybe 30% less water, which
00:11:33
Speaker
You know, reading UK did a little bit of research about this in the early two thousands, but let's see, it looks like 20% reduction on an acre of tomatoes is 500,000 gallons of water a season. So like, it really does make a difference.
00:11:49
Speaker
if you need to do something like that, if your soil supports it, if all these things. It's an interesting idea and I've heard a lot of people who have started using it feel like their crops perform better. I don't know if they have any data to back that up.
00:12:07
Speaker
It passes the logic. They're still getting production, so it's not killing their plants or able to produce. I would say, to be clear, the water savings is something that is compounding with, they're already on a drip irrigation system. They're on drip, yes. They're already getting those 90% savings over an overhead system or something like that.
00:12:31
Speaker
but then compounding like another 20% savings on that with like this light. How I heard it characterized was a frequent and light irrigation cycles like throughout the day. Is it true that in Australia the water comes out of the irrigation counterclockwise?
00:12:47
Speaker
Yes, Bernoulli of that. Instead of a pair, yeah. It's absolutely true. So Josh, what were you going to say? 100% of the time. Yeah, exactly. Josh, you mentioned drip irrigation. That's probably the most... I would wager to say it's the most common irrigation system in small scale production, both commercial and
00:13:15
Speaker
I think, you know, when you get to bigger, you get things like center pivot and other kinds of irrigation that people do. But in a nutshell, what is drip irrigation? Is that something that you can use in a home garden or like a small scale production? Why do you care? A drip? My plants need more than a drip of water, don't they? Right. Well, yeah, I would say that it is, I don't know how common it is, but it is very appropriate for
00:13:42
Speaker
Definitely smaller scales and even, you know, larger scale agriculture. But what we're talking about is you've got a pressurized water line that is flexible, that connects to and we'll call that like the main line. And then you have a series of
00:13:59
Speaker
other pressurized tubes that sometimes they can be flat or they're just really small tubes that have membranes or very small holes in them that drop water right at the plant root zone. So you're getting water right where the plant needs it.
00:14:15
Speaker
And by doing that, you're looking at tremendous water savings because you're not losing so much to evaporation. Like the oldest school system of irrigation was flood systems where you would dig trenches and flood them. And believe it or not, that is still used.
00:14:34
Speaker
in really large agricultural systems in places that have water scarcity problems. Like I had seen it out in Southern California and Southern New Mexico and you can deliver, I mean if you have the water you can deliver a lot of water to plants
00:14:52
Speaker
And it can have this effect of, you know, suppressing other things, but the amount of water that is lost because it's not being delivered right to the root zone and instead is leaching out or evaporating out is pretty tremendous. Estimates are above like 90 to 95% of the water that you're on the hook for is going completely not where you want it.
Irrigation for Home Gardens
00:15:15
Speaker
So if you're imagining like your garden, you know, and if you laid out a square garden or a rectangular garden,
00:15:21
Speaker
one edge of it where all the you know that you're looking down all of the rows is going to have your main line and then there's a strip of irrigation line t tape drip tape sometimes it's called that goes down each row and in theory you can plant a plant right where those long drip tapes have like you were saying those little holes
00:15:40
Speaker
And if you turn it on and let it and watch for a while, you'll end up with these little circles of water that go down the row and you could theoretically, you know, plant into each of those. But Ray, you were talking about you sometimes see people who have worked with the drip kits or something like that. And there's actually a little spaghetti tubing kind of individual thing. Yeah, you I'll back up just one step even before that, Brad.
00:16:04
Speaker
You ask what I see most common in gardens. I'd say hand watering, my goodness. On a small scale, we could even start with hand watering and work our way up from there. I still think it's the most common, followed by soaker hoses. There's a place for all of these types of watering. If it works for you, then you know what? As a homeowner, it works.
00:16:27
Speaker
But yeah, when we get up to the drip tape, which, which to me sort of the third or fourth level, uh, as far as occurrence that I see, uh, homeowners using that. But to me, it's either a film or tape that's designed to provide a uniform, continuous area of moisture along a row, you know, usually depending on your sole top, a couple of feet out, depending on how long you run the tape.
00:16:52
Speaker
So that's the first time, like Josh, that's what he was talking about. That's, I guess, Josh, the most common commercially that we see kind of drip tape, what we call drip tape. The other type of water delivery system would be an individual point source of delivery, what we call spaghetti tubes. A lot of times it's a single emitter that we can drop into something like a raised bed container and water a couple of pepper plants. And both of those systems have their place. And the great news for homeowners is that I'm seeing that
00:17:23
Speaker
widely available for homeowners on a small scale it used to be that you had to buy
00:17:28
Speaker
500, 1000 feet of drip tape, or they wouldn't sell it to you. Now you can buy small kits that are pretty incredible for home gardens in both types, both drip tape and drip emitters, individual emitters that, and then single emitters would be something I'm trying to think of a use case scenario. You guys, the case that I keep coming back to is how I've used them is if I have individual containers on a patio or something of flowers or vegetables.
00:17:55
Speaker
So they both have their place in home gardens and I've used both of them and really enjoyed both of them. But yeah, that's the two tops to me is the continuous run kind of tape and then the individual emitters.
00:18:08
Speaker
the emitters and like the, whether they're on the end of spaghetti tubing or something that's directly into kind of that, uh, sub line, not necessarily a main line are used often in greenhouse production for like hanging baskets. So, so that you can water everything up top. Uh, and then they might hand water the benches below them. So they'll be using those, but also vineyards will use them. And so they'll run that.
00:18:35
Speaker
that main line up actually high and they'll drop the tubing down low, which helps prevent critters from necessarily cutting through them in the winter to get to the water. Then I've seen them the same things on ground, like for blueberries and stuff that don't have a lot of feeder roots to go collect water, they really need water given to them directly.
00:18:55
Speaker
at the base, and so they'll use either spaghetti tubing or emitters to put them right in. And the beauty of the emitters is that it's not necessarily a predisposed spacing. And so like drip tape, you can get, I think at like six inch, eight inch, 12 inches, usually the standard
00:19:15
Speaker
Spacing you see well if I've got my peonies or my blueberry bushes, you know three feet apart Or maybe some of them are a little bit, you know wonky at the end. I can actually You know punch holes myself and space them appropriately So I'm not wasting any water in between where weeds are gonna grow I can put that water only to where the plants are process Alexis is pretty modular in it that punching of holes It's not as complicated as it sounds is it?
00:19:41
Speaker
No, no, it's not. I actually sat my master's project. I had to do that for greenhouse cucumbers. And so we were putting spaghetti tubing in and I had to take it all. I took it all home and sat in front of the TV and put in emitters into the.
00:19:57
Speaker
Attached the tubing to the emitters in front of the TV for hours on end. So it is very mindless. Your thumbs will hurt. Didn't you get water all over your living room? Yes, she did. It was chaos. I lived in a pool for a while. It was fine. Oh, she's aquatic.
00:20:16
Speaker
Yeah, I think that that punch hole kind of spaghetti tube system that customizability, it also makes it, you know, very good for like an established landscape kind of system, right, where you got something set up and, you know, you've got your your plants that need to be irrigated in a completely non uniform fashion, that you could set up a custom kind of spaghetti tubing with emitter system to irrigate it.
00:20:41
Speaker
Now with all of these, both the drip tape and the emitters, an important metric to look at when you're looking at that and maybe a new concept for homeowners is flow rate or gallons per hour or whatever rating is of the linear foot of the system that you're laying down or in the case of emitters, they will each have an individual rating, but that's something good to know because you kind of
00:21:05
Speaker
What you're going to run into if you run too big of an area, Brett mentioned wells that are rectangular gardeners, it is square. However big your garden is, if you size it too big, all of these systems work within a pressure range. And that's good to know also. Most of these systems are, I don't know, they're pretty low pressure. They're 20, 24 pounds. In fact, that's a component of the system. Maybe a pressure reducer, but I have had homeowners find that out the hard way.
00:21:30
Speaker
they'll hook it up to a 50 pound straight into a miserable water supply and it blows all of the low pressure system apart, but you'll see the documentation on these home systems are pretty good, the documentation is, and that's one thing it'll specify as a little pressure reducer, and it's not expensive, it's a small little thing, but keep that in mind, but the one thing that you wanna understand about your system is that there is different ratings, different flow rates or drip rates,
00:21:58
Speaker
of these different types of components. Mm hmm. Yeah, almost always. Well, I guess it depends, but almost always, you're going to have to step down the pressure from what's coming off of your house or whatever. It's going to be too much because if you run it straight into the drip tape, just going to blow it up. You blow all the little fittings that Lexus sat there in her living room and put together mindlessly. Yeah.
00:22:19
Speaker
There are certain emitters, usually like much higher flow rates that do have a minimum PSI they need in order to actually like hit the area that
Irrigation System Setup and Maintenance Tips
00:22:28
Speaker
they're doing. But yeah, Brett's totally right. For the most part, especially with drip, you're going to be stepping down because they're made for lower flow. Reducing the pressure, basically. You'll get a pressure regulator that will say that it'll take it from, you know, you have to figure out what the pressure is off your house, but it'll take it from 30 PSI down to 15 PSI.
00:22:47
Speaker
you're coming off of something huge, sometimes you actually have to run multiple regulators because there's only so much that one single regulator can do. But that's probably beyond the scope of what everybody's particularly aware of. Yeah. If you've got like an eight-inch mainline coming out of like a pump system, you've got a guy for this. Yeah, you've got- I don't have to exfoliate in my shower because it just blasts the skin off. Also, if you just panicked at
00:23:11
Speaker
All of these words that are happening that can be really stressful. I just, it's okay. And you're not going to break anything when we say it might blow it apart. It just means that like your line flies off and you're like, Oh man, it's something it can easily put back on. And then you go, Oh, I need a pressure regulator. Or if you're like me who always forgets or loses her pressure regulators, I just turned my spigot on half.
00:23:36
Speaker
Like sometimes the science. You are the pressure regulator. I am the pressure regulator. Sometimes the science is super sciency and sometimes it's just like.
00:23:45
Speaker
figure it, just do it. And even if you're getting confused by flow rates and whether or not the PSI is affecting how much is coming out of an emitter, you can always do the thing of putting it over a bucket and timing the amount of time that you're going to run an irrigation cycle to see how much water you will apply. At the very worst, if you oversize your system in your garden,
00:24:07
Speaker
and you don't have the volume and flow coming from the tap because pressure is one thing but total volume is another. If you oversize the system what that means is at the very end of your system usually your emitters will not be admitting the same amount as at the beginning of the system and you can see that just kind of pay attention when the soil is very dry. I'm assuming that most homeowners are not using plastic culture raised beds or probably
00:24:33
Speaker
installing some of these homeowner systems on bare soil and just kind of pay attention to your area of moisture and if that's not uniform you you kind of may have to go back and look at breaking your garden down into zones and only watering half of your garden at one time so that you have good uniform pressure and you you don't have pressure drop off at the end of those lines because they just won't get watered the same. So what like what Ray talked about like so for instance when I had the big
00:25:02
Speaker
garden horticultural system set up in our backyard that was basically a very, very small version of what a commercial drip tape tape system would look like. I think I had eight or 10 50 foot long rows in the backyard. And so I would turn off
00:25:19
Speaker
four of them or five of them, water, five rows, and then I would come back and turn the other ones off. So almost every step along the way has some sort of a valve that you can turn off and on. They're very affordable. Aren't they made for the system? Brett, this is really common. What do we call them? Quarter turn valves or whatever. Quarter turn valves. Yeah. And it's the same way like Alexis was talking about with the spaghetti tube. You get a little tool and you use it. It's like
00:25:42
Speaker
I don't even know what it's like, almost like a screwdriver or something, but it has little teeth on it and you use it to punch these holes and you pop things in. It's not super complicated. If you ever get the chance to go and check out, you can go and, if you're interested in doing this commercially or whatever, you can go and check out another farm or one of the, like the research farm at UK or something to just see how it's set up. You'll be like, oh, this isn't as complicated as these fools are making. But it is hard to see it.
00:26:12
Speaker
It's hard to describe. It's hard to do it without seeing it. Yeah. Josh, isn't it since you have a pub or a video or something on that? Yeah, Brett and I made a little five-minute video on simple drip irrigation systems. We'll put a link in the show notes. There's also a video with friends of the show, Jessica Besson.
00:26:34
Speaker
Jay Tucker from South farm yeah talking about components of a horticulture horticultural irrigation system with different pieces that's the one you're talking about Josh is a different Different yeah, so we got multiple multiple different videos There's some great videos out there and you'll see how simple it really is once you look at the video It's kind of takes a lot of words to describe But a very short video will have you putting your system together in no time
00:26:57
Speaker
Yeah. A couple other technologies I want to get your all's take on. So one of them, we actually did, we mentioned the spaghetti tubing thing, I think. But we actually, when we were working, and I was working at the farm with Aaron Stancome, and we were trying to get our
00:27:12
Speaker
carrots and beets and things to germinate. We actually played around with these little micro sprinklers that hooked on to the end of spaghetti tubing. It's a little tiny sprinkler, sort of, but it would cast about eight to 10 foot circle of a fine mist. Foot or inch?
00:27:37
Speaker
foot. We would set it up on two beds and then overlap them enough that it would cover that entire area. The sprinkler itself was probably about including the stake that went into the ground maybe 12 inches tall. We could run a series of maybe six or eight of them off of a line going down. They were actually really cool.
00:28:02
Speaker
We'll come back to this, but if you were watering something that had foliage on it and not germinating seed, it would be a little bit of a different kind of thing. But as far as that germination, it was pretty cool and relatively effective, at least in our experimentation there. But another one I wanted to get your all's take on is the soaker hose.
00:28:21
Speaker
I love the soaker hose. I recommend a soaker hose all the time because I feel like it is as close as you can get to drip irrigation without the like, yeah. It's like to adopt those to your thing. Like part of me sometimes is like, man, can I just run soccer hoses on everything? Because, you know, sometimes drip gets really annoying and I get weird leaks in places and, you know, it's really last longer too.
00:28:49
Speaker
Drip emitters get stopped up for me all the time. Yeah. I don't know, but I recommend them for homeowners and for small gardeners who are not quite ready to make a leap into drip soaker hoses all the time. For the uninitiated, can you give a description of what a soaker hose is?
00:29:05
Speaker
It looks like a garden hose, but it's black and it's sort of, it's made of, I guess, kind of like a web, almost like a webbing. And basically water just seeps through the entire, like around the whole thing very slowly. Yeah, sweating. That's excellent. If you took a, if you took a garden hose and use the thumbtack to punch 1 million holes into it.
00:29:27
Speaker
Yeah. It just, it just slowly kind of gurgles out. Sweats is a really good way to put it. Um, and then it just does that the entire length of the hose. And you like that so much better than like, one of the options we haven't talked about is overhead sprinklers, but why do you like the soaker hose or do you like it better than overhead sprinklers? For our soils, for clay soils, I like
00:29:50
Speaker
I like something right at the root zone. Not only because disease issues and stuff that Brett alluded to earlier with the sprinkler system, but
00:29:59
Speaker
to keeping disease off, but you're, you're not wasting as much. Uh, you don't need as high of a pressure. You know, we always say with sprinklers, you kind of need a higher pressure and I use sprinklers. Like don't get me wrong. Yeah, they have their place. Sure. They have their place. Sure. Uh, but yeah, I like, I like the water going right where I tell it to go. Cause I have control issues. That evaporation is a huge deal. Like if you were at a golf course, I mean, uh, the,
00:30:26
Speaker
evaporation is a big deal to them. Well, it is any operation that's using like gun traveling, gun top irrigation out West. I mean, they just have to account for a certain percentage loss. Anytime you can deliver the water straight to the soil, A plus. Yeah. So one of the reasons I like a Soaker hose, and I actually don't have any that I use right now, but
00:30:47
Speaker
It's maybe not horticulturally optimal in this same way that drip tape is because drip tape takes forever to water something.
Automating Irrigation with Timers
00:30:57
Speaker
You have to leave it on and then you forget that you left it on. That's great because it's a little bit slower in mother nature or whatever, but the soaker hose,
00:31:08
Speaker
especially if you're if you're putting it out to like a very select area and you're able to overlap the soaker hose a little bit or beds or anything like that. It's so much it feels to me at least so much faster because you just have a bunch of holes that are leaking the water out and it's just easier to go out turn it on for a few minutes, let it rip and then turn it back off and not have to
00:31:28
Speaker
Yeah, not if it's at a timer or wake up in the middle of the night and think, did I turn the water off? So many times I've let it in a place. It's like you can have it set up in a few minutes. You don't need to like go get a bunch of components or anything like that. It's just the hose. You connect it to your other hose. You turn it on. Boom.
00:31:47
Speaker
I think it's also either easier to find as far as, that was one of the funny things when I went from working in the vegetable research stuff and having, you know, we would go to these horticulture suppliers and get huge amounts and we would have those things on hand. When I moved to being at home, I was like,
00:32:03
Speaker
Where do I go and get like 50 feet of drill? I guess I had a lot of 50 feet, but it was just harder to source some of those things that are such industry standards, whereas a soaker hose, you could probably go and pick one of those up the same day at a garden center. That's the sales guy and be like, look, I'm running an eighth acre garden. Yeah.
00:32:26
Speaker
The soaker hoses, they have like kits now where you can like cut your own, you know, like to fit and you put your own little things in there. I've, I've done those and I just, I, they're easy. They're just, you just twist them together. You know what I mean? They're just, they're just, if you can use a garden hose, you can use a soaker hose. And I think that's part of the reason I like it versus, you know, with drip it take, if you've never done it before, it can be exhausting to think about. You guys mentioned time being a factor. Some systems take a long time to water soaker hoses.
00:33:02
Speaker
I've worked in operations where we did. I don't use one personally right now, but yeah, they're brilliant, right? I mean, it's like the problem of, oh, you forget you left it on, all those kinds of things. You can just turn a dial for the really simple ones, right? It's something that can hook up right to your hydrant and you can just set it for a time and it'll mechanically close when it's done. And that's pretty nice. I like the mechanical ones. I mean, I know there's battery versions, but then I'm always worried about the batteries. I've used both tops for home, especially if I'm going on vacation
00:33:23
Speaker
You know, things like that take less time to water. Do any of you all use timers?
00:33:31
Speaker
And I don't have a friend or family member that's really close and handy to kind of check on things for me. And I've always loved raised beds and containers and those just need to be watered. I mean, every day, just about in the summer for certain crops that you may have in there. And that's where timers have really saved me.
00:33:49
Speaker
That's where the battery timers are so good because they don't take any intervention. You don't have to crank them over to 30 minutes and then at mechanics. Yeah. So timer technology has gotten really, really good. And I've come to trust the major brands, you know, pretty good degree of trust in those. I do check on them every now and again.
00:34:09
Speaker
Uh, you, you absolutely need to check on components like that, but yeah, timers can be a great thing, but you don't want to arbitrarily set a timer and, and, you know, be irrigating in the middle of a rainstorm. They take a little bit of intervention and common sense, but yeah, here lately that timers have just gotten better and better over time. I have explored the like, uh, smartphone based timers and things like that. And I haven't, I haven't pulled the trigger on getting one yet, but.
00:34:37
Speaker
I have considered it, but I've never worked with timers. I've never worked with those on like a home scale. I know commercially they've been available for some time. You can do some things there, but for homeowners, that's pretty neat. You know, Ray, I would just get something that would be for like a hundred acres.
00:34:55
Speaker
design it define it into like 16 zones that each have their own irrigation profile. It's like oh the even numbered zones need to be skipped today. That really appeals to a part of my brain though you guys that really does appeal to a part of my brain. There was a I worked on a research plot so we're talking like very small scale for kind of irrigating containers that were you know subject to a bunch of different treatments and we had one of those
00:35:21
Speaker
I mean, I don't want to say one of the rain, but I was about to say the name of the brand, but kind of one of the more complex controllers where you have different zones and you can set up a timing cycle, but that also has like an instant like kind of bypass for like, if there's a rainfall event, you can just walk out there and hit a button and it'll skip like the next, however many.
00:35:43
Speaker
They're pretty, I mean, the first time I saw one was I had already been involved in Ag for, I don't know, eight years. And I was like, what is this? This is amazing. I, uh, I, I go back and forth between them because I can't find one that doesn't leak. And that really irritates me because it's, which isn't a big deal if you're like, I'm just setting it for two hours and I'm going to come shut the water off, but it's just to like help and make sure in case I forget.
Using Rainwater and Understanding Water Quality
00:36:09
Speaker
But I know with the pulse watering, like we mentioned earlier, a lot of people are setting up, essentially, you're pulsing on a timer, right? They have those timers, they're always on. I don't know what I'm doing wrong that my stuff leaks so bad.
00:36:30
Speaker
like it's watering too much or no like the connect now because these are commercial systems and we've had this discussion with new commercial producers these things are
00:36:42
Speaker
kind of watertight but they they drip they're more like hardwired in versus like just screwing them on because they're so fast to modify and you're essentially just punching in a barbed connector they're not perfect they will leak some especially like spaghetti type what we're calling spaghetti tubing that goes into like a smaller hard tube yeah there's there's leaks in these systems and i know what you mean alexis because i expect everything to be watertight and efficient but
00:37:09
Speaker
Some of these systems you're going to have leaks in. My timer is that I put an obnoxious, like bracelet or something on my wrist until, until I shut the water off circulation. And when my hand goes, when I start feeling lightheaded, I need to turn the water off. It's in, I'm really in trouble. Then I flooded everything.
00:37:38
Speaker
Also, is that where you're getting your leaks? Is where you're getting those punches or like the actual connection?
00:37:43
Speaker
Listen, every, all the things leaks everywhere. And part of that drip system, you know, some of it is probably, I just need a new head hose, like a name, a new main line, so to speak, are using like life. What we call lay flat Alexis. I have, I do like orchard tubing, which is like that harder to, I've always done that. I don't know why, but that's just what it's always me to at those connection points. I'm just, I always like throw in more gaskets.
00:38:13
Speaker
Well, I know, but you're going right into like a plastic. Then I have them at the, you know, where I'm turning on the water, the actual spigot. The other thing about the timer, like the, the freak, I mean, I guess if you're using a timer in the same way that you would, if you were turning the water off and on, like the, the pull, the off and on pulsing of the.
00:38:35
Speaker
of the pressure off and onto me is going to loosen the connections over time even more. It's like a hammer effect or whatever. I don't know. I haven't played with it, but I'm not exactly sure. Maybe one other technological side of things before we move on to some tips about approaches to watering.
00:38:55
Speaker
So we've talked about, I think a whole episode about rain barrels, um, but any sort of general things you want to say about irrigating with rainwater as far as how to do it or things to consider. I have talked about, so I do have.
00:39:11
Speaker
Electric pumps that pump water out of my rain barrels and pressurize it up to hose level pressure or beyond I do all I don't grow any sort of annual horticulture crops for the most a few I guess but I hand water everything now myself at my house And most of that is coming out of rain barrels that's pumped out. But if you don't have a pump What about dealing with the lower lower flow any sort of tips or tricks or anything like that?
00:39:39
Speaker
Yeah, we touch bases on that on a earlier episode. I know that you alluded to Brett and then, um, you know, there's some basic principles you have to have in place like change in elevation. Is that what you're getting at Brett? Yeah. Pressure. You have to have elevation drop and you gain so many pounds of pressure over so many feet. And there's formulas for that. We can help you out with, or you can go and listen to the episode where we covered that. Yeah. I would encourage you to go back and find the rainbow episode.
00:40:05
Speaker
Yeah, but uh, and one thing I have on my on mine where I have the pump set up i'm i'm able to Very quickly switch to city water when I run out of water barrel water. Um, because that's one thing I think if you're
00:40:19
Speaker
If you're really serious about irrigating and you're wanting to use some rainwater, that's great, but make sure you also have a plan for being able to use another source of water because when we have a drought, surprise, the rainwater, the rainwater also don't fill up. And you know, these different water sources have different qualities. If you're in a bigger city or a metropolitan area, that's known to have a certain acidity level for surface water. You need to know that just on the flip side of that, if you're using a municipal water source here in Kentucky, they tend to be very basic.
00:40:48
Speaker
And commercially that really causes some issues with our greenhouse operations. And we have to account for that sometimes through acidifying processes, you know, acid injection, so on and so forth, but that's on larger scales. I guess my point being is that you have to consider the water source when you're, you know, salt content, acidity levels or lack thereof. All of those things are important just to kind of know a little bit about the source that you're using.
Optimal Watering Techniques for Plant Health
00:41:15
Speaker
Well, water versus surface water versus municipal.
00:41:18
Speaker
Yeah, to ground truth that a little bit. So naturally, I have a pH meter for the small system that I have. Exactly. This one does. Yeah. Data collection. And so our rainwater can be between a pH of 6.5 and 7.2. Nice. Very slightly. Not too bad. Yeah. Slightly acidic. But our ground water, like our municipal water, runs like 8.4 to 9.
00:41:46
Speaker
Yeah. I actually do acidify. I will fill the rain barrels and acidify that water.
00:41:56
Speaker
What are you using as a, as a homeowner? What source, like, is there like an easy source that pops up in there? I, I dechlorinate it and then I add vinegar. Gotcha. Yep. And, and so the, the, the reason that I try to de, I dechlorinate it first so that the chlorine doesn't buffer the cause I tried it before I've just had vinegar and that would adjust the pH correctly. And then I'd come back and test the pH two days later and it would have been back up again. Cause the anyway.
00:42:24
Speaker
doesn't, it's way down the rabbit hole of where you need to go. But the point is there are different pHs and like perennial plants, especially some of them really like a little bit more acidic. Most plants like things a little bit in that acidic neutral range. So anyway, you'll see some nutrient deficiencies and yet you're pretty sure you have fertilized adequately. And sometimes that can be part of the issue is just something's interfering with uptake or
00:42:50
Speaker
For whatever reason, my plants all seem to prefer rainwater. So when I can use rainwater, they really are happy, which is kind of cool. But also if you don't run out of rainwater, then what do you do?
00:43:02
Speaker
So I wanted to put in the, uh, prepper style, you know, 2,500 gallon tank that Annie shot down. So like a water tower in your backyard, tear down the garage and replace it with a big reservoir. Nice 20,000 gravity. Let's get a sister and Doug. It's fine.
00:43:22
Speaker
Exactly. Exactly. So what about, I mean, so we talked, we've talked about the, the water splash and or water on the leaves as a not good, not so good thing. And so briefly, what's the, what's the deal with that? Disease, disease, disease. Anytime you have, especially soil splash, moisture's bad. Soil splashed moisture is generally worse because that's where a lot of the diseases reside. So there's a,
00:43:50
Speaker
a ladder effect with rain splash. There's a ladder effect with diseases and rain splash regardless because a lot of diseases need, you know, dark cycle and moisture to reproduce or spread. And you're creating that environment. So time of day matters and method of water application matters. So if you're applying the water to the soil,
00:44:11
Speaker
and you're applying it, let's say earlier in the day, you're really illuminating a lot of those conditions that allow for disease spread. The worst case scenario, you're using a sprinkler system at night, or going with wet leaf tissue into the evening. That's the worst case scenario. And why is that?
00:44:31
Speaker
Just diseases. It's a, it's a favorable environment for disease transmission and spread because a lot of the fungus, once again, yeah. Funguses, bacteria, certain bacteria, but a lot of the funguses, they need that dark cycle, dark and the cold and wet or cool and wet. Just all the bad things together. Does it, I just want to throw up a disease triangle right now. That's the plant pathologies coming back to me, but yeah, that's a time and time of day is important when you water.
00:44:59
Speaker
A lot of times will set my timer to be early in the morning, but if I'm going overhead watering, I do that early in the morning because there's some benefits knocking because when you water, you...
00:45:11
Speaker
knock the dew off plants and that causes actually the plants to dry quicker. And golf courses use this concept all the time. It's pretty interesting. So there's lots of benefits. If you have to water over the head, do that early in the morning, you have less evaporation also. So you get all the benefits. Um, if, if that's your preferred method or the only method that you have, do that in the mornings. Yeah. And to your, to your point, right. I think, I guess it was last year, maybe it was the year before, but I think last year when we had a really long prolonged period of drought and not, not a lot of rainfall.
00:45:41
Speaker
And I'm irrigating in the midst of that on like a lot of my plants. That was like the best my plants have ever looked. Oh, yeah. They're getting the water right at the roots and they're not getting any on the leaves. It's like, man, disease is no early. Like the central valley of California, you know, gone medical water in. It's amazing, especially with commercial producers when they have these dry years, it's usually a low disease pressure year for a lot of these diseases because you just don't get transmission. Yeah, good stuff.
00:46:11
Speaker
What about, so you said mentioned time of day as a part of the consideration. Yeah. Uh, early, I try not to water in the evenings. Um, you know, going into the evening too late, uh, early to midday. And then that's when I kind of knock off my water and operations personally, especially on a commercial scale. What about knowing when knowing when to water?
00:46:34
Speaker
That's tougher. I mean, there's lots of, I know this is gonna get you guys in the fields, but there's lots of tools and data driven sort of gadgets to know when to water, they measure water, like arometers and things like that that are used commercially that are very, very important on a commercial scale. And some of those tools are becoming available to homeowners, but a real simple test that I use is the screwdriver test or the finger test,
00:47:02
Speaker
First of all, I have to know a little bit about the plant that I'm working with tomato versus something like corn. You have to know the average depth of roots where most of the roots that are performing water uptake, you have to know kind of what depth those are at. And then you kind of want to water in general to that depth. And I know there's lots of new and emerging systems that are like micro emitters, micro irrigation, pulse irrigation.
00:47:29
Speaker
But if I had my choice, I would water thoroughly and more deeply on a crop like tomatoes rather than, you know, frequently and at a more shallow depth. Sure. Kind of like more what is done for trees, things in the landscape, things are going to be there longer. Yes. Yes. The opposite of pulse systems where you water less frequently but deeply.
00:47:51
Speaker
They're not very, that's not a very sophisticated method of watering, but it works very well for homeowners on a small scale. They don't have to, they're not using tens of thousands of gallons of water at a time.
Watering Houseplants and Seasonal Adjustments
00:48:03
Speaker
So, you know, if in doubt, just kind of water deeply and less often. And that seems to be a good general strategy. I know on flowers, Alexis, I see people outside watering like flowers, like almost every day. I mean, is that more common with like on flowers or just flowers?
00:48:21
Speaker
flower lovers love their flowers. Is that what's going on? I think flower lovers love their flowers. Yeah. So, I mean, why not? Because they're beautiful, you know, things that are out there growing. Do you want your friends to go thirsty, Ray? Uh, depends. I do not want my, I mean, St. Patrick's Day was not far behind us. So no, I don't want my friends to be thirsty.
00:48:46
Speaker
Cool. Yeah, there's some interesting research around like that kind of wind to irrigate. I was on like a longer term water research kind of grant, but one of the terms was this idea of what they called deficit irrigation. And this is for very large kind of growers that are growing horticultural crops, but it's knowing your individual crop. And then they have these essentially a local weather station that they combine with an understanding of what is the
00:49:16
Speaker
evapotranspiration rate, like how much water is moving through the plant column and then they water to replace just that. Yeah, it's a replacement strategy. On this farm that was, you know, several hundred acres, there was just a building and that house like their weather station and a computer that just calculated when they needed to run irrigation cycles to give that like quarter inch or half inch back.
00:49:40
Speaker
Yeah, I think I forget guys, the UK there has it was one of the resources, it's called a simple calculations for small drip irrigation systems. And I'm gonna have to go look that up. I forget who put that together. Josh, that wasn't you. No, that was Brent Ral and it's HO 122. Thank you. Yeah, that's a really good resource we need to put in the show notes. Yeah, I think as a just as a supplement to this screwdriver or finger test and just
00:50:08
Speaker
Full disclosure, Ray was born one of his fingers as a screwdriver. It's a rare condition. It's a flat screwdriver or a four-way. And if you're Brett, you use a tensiometer, which you, of course, already have. Well, I was going to say, I do have a soil moisture sensor that I do. And it's not the tensiometer. It's more like you install it and then go and reference it. But I actually have one that's more like a probe. And it's pretty good. It does a pretty good job where you can kind of spot test moisture
00:50:35
Speaker
So there are there are supplementary and that's just a homeowner inexpensive one that I got online Yeah, I also have a light meter to see
00:50:46
Speaker
It's really cool because, you know, we talk about, people talk about this concept of partial shade, but we don't really define exactly what that is. And so anyway. We do in houseplants. Exactly. Well, I mean, I didn't mean, I meant the other we, not me and you, per se. That's a good, that's a good point real quick, Alexis. Do you have, what's your, you know, elevator pitch for educating someone on how to water their houseplants?
00:51:14
Speaker
when I told your wife that she did not like it. If you are the person who likes to water things on a schedule, plants are not for you, okay? You don't drink water on a schedule necessarily. You drink it when you're thirsty. She hasn't spoken to you since she said that. No.
00:51:30
Speaker
But I usually tell people, I want you to water all your plants really deeply so that they're heavy and there's water falling out the bottom of the pot. And then I want you to hold that pot and feel how heavy it is. And when it's much lighter than that, you need to water again. It's honestly the best way I can tell you because the plants that you have by a heat register, if we're talking house plants, are going to be different than the plant that's five feet away, but they're in the same room.
00:51:55
Speaker
But this one's by the heat register, so it's going to need water more often. Or if you have a Hoya versus an orchid versus all these plants like different things. So the one way in all of the years I have been growing houseplants and working in greenhouses, you can truly tell.
00:52:11
Speaker
is either you wait till it wilts and at that point the plant is stressed or you learn to pick up that plant and see how heavy the pot is and I know that sounds silly but you know the finger like you know poke it putting the finger down in there I mean that works too but I use some shallow pots and that's not always you know the same I don't know so I go back and forth with that method for house plants but learn what it feels like when that pot is fully drenched and then you will you will know what it feels like when it's like like
00:52:41
Speaker
You don't have to be a rocket scientist. Okay. You wait until it wilts and then kind of hold it again. And then you could do that. Yeah. It's like, you're really not sure. And you could, you could do that, but are tough for me because some houseplants do really well inside. When I bring certain plants in like pothos.
00:52:57
Speaker
The thing continues to actively grow like crazy, whereas other plants over there, like ivy's and stuff, their growth rate really slows. So you have to know each plant. And like in the winter, I'm watering my house plants once a month, but in the summer I might be doing it once a week, you know? And so sometimes it's, you know, every six weeks in the wintertime, depending on where that plant is located and it's gross. So that's why like, it's really hard to say. And the only universal I can tell you is to figure out
00:53:27
Speaker
what it feels like when that plant is fully drenched and you'll tell the difference. Just ask it, Brett. Learn to speak plants and everything will be okay. I do think people in the garden and house plants and other things, people tend to fall into a category of
00:53:45
Speaker
over-water or under-water just like as a personality type. And so I think part of it is like figuring out which one of those you are and then adjusting back. But I do think there is sort of like this getting to know it and read it and learn it. And people say in Bonsai that like the hardest thing to learn is proper watering because it just requires like a level of nuance and kind of
00:54:07
Speaker
All the contextual factors you were saying, Alexis, of what kind of day it's been, or what kind of year it is, or what kind of plant it is, or even that particular plant tends to be a thirstier pathos, or whatever.
00:54:19
Speaker
how cold it is outside. I also did not know that the Georgetown mascot was a houseplant. We're always learning stuff on this pod. They have first time for everything. Did not know that. Yeah, I do think that's another aspect of it that you have to just, even with the garden stuff, you have to kind of learn and understand
00:54:42
Speaker
It's always funny to see a person who's been doing it for a while. It's almost, it feels like they have like a Spidey sense that tingles. It's like, oop, I need to get up there. Those things are going to need water. And it's funny because
00:54:56
Speaker
Once you get to that level, you're like, oh yeah, it's nothing crazy, but it is magical to someone who hasn't mastered it yet. How do you know how to do that? You're like, I don't know. I can't explain it. I don't know. The plant looks sad. What do you want? It looks like it always does, but it's
Episode Wrap-up and Final Encouragements
00:55:10
Speaker
sad. It told me. Couldn't you hear their screams?
00:55:16
Speaker
Awesome. Cool. Well, any lasting thoughts then as we wrap this up? We always think episodes will be short, sweet to the point where like, Oh, we won't have a ton to say on something like this. And then we're like 15 minutes into an episode and we're like, Oh yeah, we, we actually have a lot to say.
00:55:33
Speaker
So anyways, that will be good. Cool. Well, thank you all for joining us today. We really appreciate it. Feel free to message us on Instagram. You can follow us there at hort culture podcast. You can also shoot us an email that's in the show notes.
00:55:50
Speaker
It's long, so I won't read it all out here. But we do read those. We do see everything and check it. And we really appreciate you all reaching out with questions and thoughts. And we enjoy it. It makes me feel good. I'm sure I feel like I can speak for everybody.
00:56:07
Speaker
My phone is ringing in my current office, as you can hear. It's springtime, so it's popular. And I have no idea how to mute it because it's a new phone. So bear with me here. But anyways, we hope that as we grow this podcast, you will continue to grow plants and grow anything really you want. We don't talk about animals on here, but you could be into that if you want to, but continue to grow with us and that you will join us next time. Have a great one.