Soak it up

Four years ago Paul installed a soaker hose system in our vegetable garden. That was our best growing season by far. However, the last three growing seasons we did not reinstall our soaker hose system, which in my humble opinion has been the demise of our exceptional yields.

It goes something like this (information shared by Paul via master gardening program). Water your garden as if you are watering an inverted cone-like sponge. The idea here is that you saturate the wide opening of the upside down cone until it reaches the point of the cone (the spot near the base of the plant). If the cone is well-saturated then plants will be able to access the water even in very windy, dry, sunny days - a regular occurrence in Flagstaff. So what the soaker hose does is allows the water to slowly soak into the inverted cone. Surface watering evaporates too quickly and if you hand water you will not spend us much time on each plant letting the water soak the conical sponge.

Mulching the surface of your garden will also prevent the soil surface from dehydrating too quickly.

So this year, we are going to reinstall soaker hoses in combination with mulching. I will report later in the season if my revisted approach is correct.


Soaker Hose Image Courtesy of http://grow.ars-informatica.ca/grow_topic.php?subject=wat0