Let’s talk about how we’re handling our current drought! It’s hot enough here that even the lower 48 is worried about us!
One of the things you can’t do when it gets hot is ignore your garden. This is especially true when its relatively freshly planted. Those new plant roots just don’t go down deep, thus able to pull water from deep underground!
If we have fresh transplants in, like we do now, we often shift into a daily watering pattern. If our plants have been in for a few weeks, we might be able to push that every other day at best.
You’ve probably heard the adage that it’s better to water deeply and less frequently. This is true. The reason for this is it puts the water deeper underground, where the plant will have to put on deeper roots to get at it. This sets the plant up for long term, allowing it to get better nutrition and also sustain itself through dry periods later in the season.
When you perform a light surface watering, the plant has no need to root deeply. This will cause the plant to create shallow root systems, which also affects its ability to get at nutrition. Our general goal is deep rooting as this makes our plants far more autonomous later in the season.
When we’re watering, we usually do so for the amount of time that we think is right and then water a bit more. It takes a surprising amount of water to truly saturate the soils. Also, it’s really difficult to over water plants that are in the ground as the excess usually just goes deeper underground.
Sometimes we get transient thunderstorms during these hot periods. We’ve found we often can’t always rely on this to do that “deep” watering, so we’ll often plan for watering even if we’ve seen a bit of rainfall that day. Especially if it’s really hot. But, sometimes we also use this to give ourselves a break, ensuring we follow up with a deep watering the next day.
Our plants are surviving the heat here, but it’s definitely taking some work! It looks like this could be an extended drought for us, so I’m sure we’ll have more to say about this!
