We’ve discussed watering our indoor nursery many times in the past. But, I don’t think we’ve ever breached the topic of how we practice hydrozoning in the indoor nursery!
Hydrozoning is the concept of organizing your plants based on their water needs. The idea is to group things that need water together and things that don’t currently need water together.
We heavily practice the watering technique called bottom watering across most of our transplants. This basically means that we add water into the 1020 tray, which is then absorbed into the soil. Conveniently, this also avoids overwatering as you can just remove excess water! This is a very fast way of watering many hundreds of plants, simultaneously.
However, to prevent overwatering plants that have plenty of moisture, we’ll often move our transplants around into different trays. (Moving either the six pack or pots.) Our general goal is to get a full tray, all of which need watering. This is, effectively, hydrozoning!
Sometimes, if we only need to water a few pots or trays, we’ll pull them into a separate tray and just water those. Once the moisture has been absorbed, we bring those plants back to their original locations.
What this also does is tend to align the water utilization across various trays, too. We often find that once we reorganize things a few times based on water need, those plants tend to “stay in sync” with each other when it comes to future watering.
Hydrozoning can also be practiced in the garden itself. We heavily use it in our container gardens, grouping plants with similar water uptake, so we can ensure one plant isn’t drawing water away from all the other plants.
