Are Your Plants Suffering from a Drought?

Posted on Monday, September 5, 2022 · Leave a Comment 

Soaker hoses provide a slow, deep watering. This hose put in place in early spring.

Many of my readers are suffering from a serious drought, enough so that plants are losing leaves and going dormant long before they should. Most well established plants will recover from the effects of drought, even if they lose their leaves now. And new things? If you have not been giving them water weekly or more often, some may die.

 

Added to the problem is the fact that many places have enacted watering bans or limitations. And wells may not have enough to water everything. And of course, watering takes time – time away from family, dogs, and recreation.

 

If you have not been thinking about the drought, you should. Start by looking at your plants. Are leaves limp, withered, or turning brown? If so, you need to water them well – today! They need a good deep watering.

 

Deep watering is not easy. If you take your hose and spray the base of the tree for a minute, you are not actually giving it much water.  Wait 10 minutes after watering and go back to the new tree or shrub that you planted last spring. Use your finger or a tool like the CobraHead weeder (a weeding tool with a single tine) to dig down four inches or more. Is the soil moist? It should be. Most roots are in the top foot of soil. Add more water as needed. 

 

If your soil is like powder, it is not easy to get water to penetrate the soil. If your tree is on a hillside, water you apply will run away almost immediately and not soak in at all. Even a gentle slope will allow water to run off. You will need to make a ring of soil or mulch around the tree or shrub to contain water.

 

Watering Wand

If you are using a hose, use a watering wand to apply water rather than a spray nozzle held in your hand. These wands are usually 24 inches long with a nice “rose” on the end that makes the water flow in a gentle spray and have a valve to turn the water on, off, or part way on. Since the tip of the wand is near the ground, it is less likely to wash away the soil. And it allows you to direct the water just where you want it. Soaker hoses on timers are good if you travel a lot, or vacation when it’s hot and dry.

 

Before you start watering, learn now much water your hose delivers. Do this by timing how long it takes to fill up a 5-gallon pail. Two or three minutes is usually long enough, but it depends on the diameter of your hose and the water pressure. Half inch hoses are worthless. Five-eighths inch hoses are adequate, and three-quarter inch hoses are good for long distance runs. Five gallons is the minimum quantity of water needed by a thirsty shrub or newly-installed tree.

 

Most new woody plants need five gallons every week, but it does depend on the soil type. Sandy soil dries out the quickest, and needs the most water. Clay soil holds water, but is hard to get thoroughly moist. Even though I have good soil, I always add compost to the soil when I plant anything. Not only does it add biologically activity, it holds water in sandy soil and loosens up clay soils. I buy it by the truckload. Most garden centers sell it in bulk, which is cheaper than buying it by the bag. Of the bagged compost, I like Moo-Doo and Coast of Maine brands.

 

Mulch around a tree will hold in water and help keep weeds from stealing water.

Grasses and weeds suck moisture out of the soil, so dig them out around your trees. Weed a ring around new or struggling trees that is 3 to 4-feet wide. Then get some fine mulch (double-ground mulch, not wood chips). An inch and a half of mulch is about right, or two inches. Deeper than that and short rain showers will never get moisture to your plants’ roots.

 

Don’t buy bagged wood chips based on price – or if you do, buy the most expensive. Cheap mulch may be ground up and shredded construction debris and pallets. “Color enhanced” mulch is stained or dyed with something and may spread chemicals in the garden – and fade with time.  

 

Never let the mulch touch the bark of your tree, or worse yet, make a faux-volcano of mulch. Mulch can harbor fungi that will rot the bark of your tree, killing it in 6- to 10-years. Once the cambium layer under the bark gets rotted, the tree will die. If you have mulch against any of your trees, please fix it right away.

 

Years ago I visited my friend Sydney Eddison at her home in Newtown, CT. Sydney is a garden designer, author of many fine gardening books and a poet with terrific gardens. They were in the midst of a terrible drought – so bad that mature oaks were losing their leaves in the forest by August. A water ban was in place, but her gardens looked great.

 

“Sydney,” I said, “You’ve been cheating and watering your plants.” No, she explained, “It’s all about the mulch”. Each fall her husband, Martin, mowed over all the leaves that fell on the lawns and bagged them. He stored them in the barn until spring, and after all her plants woke up in the spring, she added a layer of chopped leaves. Not only did they hold in moisture, as they broke down they added organic matter to the soil – making it better each year.

 

This fall, do the same. Collect your leaves, or have the lawn service collect them for you. I don’t bag them up, I just add them to a pile and use as mulch in the spring. It really works. A 2-inch layer is perfect.

 

Don’t be disheartened if some of your plants go dormant now. It is their way of protecting themselves. But do water if you can – and get it down deep. Your plants will bless you!

 

Reach Henry at henry.homeyer@comcast.net.

Filed under Article · Tagged with how to water in a drought, soaker hoses, watering wand

What to do in Hot, Dry Weather

We New Englanders are pretty lucky. Much of the country is saddled with a hot dry spell reminiscent of the dust bowl era of the 1930’s. I’ve seen pictures in the paper of wizened corn and unhappy farmers scratching their heads and looking up at a cloudless, unforgiving sky. We’ve had more than our fair share of hot days – in the high nineties, even – but so far I’ve had at least a thunderstorm once a week. Each week vegetables (and many flowers) need one inch of water –either from the sky, or from your watering can – but we don’t always get that. 

Recently I went to water the garden of a friend who was away for a week. The soil was as dry as powder. She had planted pole beans before she left, and they should have sprouted, but had not. I watered the bean plot, but water from the hose wouldn’t penetrate the soil. It just ran off. So I scratched the surface to loosen up the crust on top, and re-watered a few times using a watering can, giving it a slow sprinkle. Finally it worked: when I poked a finger into the soil it was dark and moist for at least 2 inches. Then I spread a light layer of straw over the soil to shade it.

Imagine yourself marooned on a desert island. No shade? You bake. Add a palm tree or two, and you survive nicely. Same for your lettuce and tomatoes. The plants love the sun, but their roots need some shade in hot, dry times.

In the vegetable garden I favor a layer of newspapers – 4 to 6 sheets thick – covered with straw, hay or leaves. I keep the newspapers away a little from the stem of each plant, as I want moisture from light rains to reach the soil. Straw comes from grain crops that have been threshed, so it is not supposed to have seeds (though it always has a few). Mulch hay always has seeds; it is grass grown for fodder for cows and sometimes it gets spoiled as feed (by rain) and sold cheaply to gardeners. The price difference is considerable – $3 for hay versus $10 or more for straw, so I generally use hay. The newspapers help to keep seeds out of the soil.

Soaker hose in flower garden in fall after clean up

What kind of watering device is best? I’ve tried plenty of them, most recently soaker hoses. Soaker hoses are designed to leak. They are a rubber-like substance that is somewhat porous. They ooze water their entire length, and that water spreads out for about 6 inches around each hose.  I installed a pressure regulator and a filter to keep particles from the water source (a pond) from clogging the pores of the soaker hose. Still, some rows – or sections of a row- got more water than others – and not in a predictable way. So some plants got little or no water, some got too much; a few rows had perfectly even distribution. 

I also installed a timer, which allowed my client to go away and know her beets or tomatoes were being watered in her absence. Timers work, but get the simplest kind possible. I have installed some that you have to program, and find those can be aggravating. I like a simple one that comes on every day at the same time, but allows you to set how long the hose will run. Test it well – before you go on vacation. 

While working as a WWOOFer on a willow farm in France a few years ago I set up an emitter watering system; it worked a lot better than the soaker hoses. (WWOOF stands for Willing Workers on Organic Farms; see www.WWOOF.org for details). The system ran three quarter-inch plastic feeder lines down the rows of plants. I used a special tool to punch holes in the feeder line and inserted barbed connectors that attached to quarter-inch lines. Each small line went to an emitter that delivered a measured amount of water per hour, depending on plant needs. Some emitters just oozed water, other types sent out a spray to cover 2 square feet or so. 

One nice thing about an emitter system is that you don’t end up watering the weeds: if you put an emitter at each tomato plant, for example, the space between plants is not watered the way it is with a soaker hose. And you can see (and replace) an emitter that gets clogged and does not deliver water. I can’t figure out why most garden centers on the East coast don’t sell these systems –every hardware store in California does.

Lawns in August can look pretty brown if a watering ban is put in place – especially if you only use chemicals on your lawn. Lawns that are given compost every year and have biologically active soil seem to do much better at staying green in dry times. It also helps to keep the grass longer in August – taller grass helps to shade the soil, like those palm trees mentioned above.

We’re all largely dependent on the heavens to provide our lawns and gardens with rain. But if we treat our soil well and provide plenty of organic matter, everything does better in times of stress – including the gardener. 

Henry Homeyer is a garden designer and the author of 4 gardening books. His Web site is www.Gardening-guy.com.

Copyright © 2014 Henry Homeyer

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