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Do you hate to water?

Posted on July 2nd, 2008 – 9:33 AM
By Connie Nelson

After our wet spring, I forgot all about watering the garden. My plants reminded me. When I got home from work the other day, they were drooping and looking wilted.

So I hauled out the hoses and started in. But I really hate to water. I know plants need water — duh!– but I always feel like I’m wasting precious resources and throwing money away (I’m really cheap).

So I’ve come up with a couple tricks to cut down on hauling hoses around. I’ve mulched my gardens well. That really helps hold in the moisture. And I’ve buried soaker hoses under the mulch in a few beds. I try to water early in the day, so the water doesn’t evaporate. I water deeply rather than often. And I save clean kitchen waste water (from the salad spinner, boiling noodles, etc.) to use on my plants.

I’d prefer that we’d get a nice, soaking rain once a week (on a Tuesday, of course). But that just isn’t happening right now. So I’ll water when I have to.

How do you conserve water? Do you hate to water, too?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008 at 9:33 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

13 Responses to "Do you hate to water?"

tph says:

July 2nd, 2008 at 11:24 am

My boyfriend just set up a rainbarrel behind the garage (complete with goldfish to supposedly eat up any mosquito larva that decide to try to breed).

I wasn’t a huge fan of the idea (especially the fish), but it is convenient to have the water available for quick watering duties (especially for the container plants).

Connie Nelson says:

July 2nd, 2008 at 12:42 pm

Hey Tph, how much water do you get from your barrel — not in gallons, but in watering plants. Can you water all of your container plants from it?

We have rain barrels at our cabin(aka The Shack) but none at home yet . . .

Amy says:

July 2nd, 2008 at 1:47 pm

Do you have to do anything special to keep the fish alive? Do you have a filter or something? Also, how do you get the water out? Just dunk a bucket into it?

tph says:

July 2nd, 2008 at 2:21 pm

Connie: it’s only been up for a couple of weeks (and we started it half full with hose water so that there’d be some place to put the fish), so it’s really hard to tell. I watered 2 of our 4 whiskey barrels this morning and didn’t seem to make too much of a dent in the water level (I really should start measuring).

Amy: feeder goldfish are pretty hardy, so long as you aren’t trying to keep them in a tiny little fishbowl. I keep fish in the house myself so I’m not 100% comfortable with having them hang out in the barrel sans-filtration, but they seem pretty happy right now. We’re feeding them a few goldfish flakes a day (since I can’t assume yet that they are getting proper nutrition from wayward insects).

I’m also just dunking in a watering can to get water out, but I’ve seen people set up spigots at the bottom of the barrel (which you’d need to keep elevated by a few inches), then you can attach a hose and have gravity feed the water out.

Laura C says:

July 2nd, 2008 at 3:42 pm

Yes! I hate watering too! My hoses seem to be installed at the worst places along the house so I need them double long to get anywhere. That seems like a lot of work to untangle them so I end up filling and refilling a watering can a bunch of times. Eventually I realize that is dorky so I untangle the hose and drag it out to my plants. I really need to get my act together and get a soaker hose!

kiwi9mm says:

July 2nd, 2008 at 4:12 pm

The husband made a water barrel for me to put in front of his shop to help keep the water from flooding his shop. 55 gallon plastic, he put a water spigot within 6″ of the bottom of the barrel for the hose and covered the top with mosquito netting. One rain filled the barrel! I’ll have to see if I can find some gold fish, that sounds like an excellent idea…

Connie Nelson says:

July 2nd, 2008 at 4:15 pm

Laura,
I’ve got a couple of soaker hoses and I just went out and bought some more. They work pretty slick, especially if you bury them under and inch or two of mulch. I had one split on me. But other than that, they’ve been great.

Amy F says:

July 2nd, 2008 at 11:58 pm

I water every day without rain, otherwise I get about half the germination rate. We have 2 rain barrels, one on the garden side of the house. There are spigots on both and we tend to use the close one and when it gets low, put a hose from the inconvenient one to the easy one and transfer the water barrel to barrel. One barrel is enough for 4 or 5 days without rain to water everything (we have about 150 sq ft in the garden and various other plants around the yard).

Weeding I’m not too fond of, but I don’t mind watering too much. The novelty of the rain barrels (and the free-ness of the water) does help, though.

sarah d says:

July 3rd, 2008 at 7:53 am

I use soaker hoses in my front bed and my garden. I love them. Not only are they great time savers, but you’re right Connie, I can water deeper and then wait a day before watering again. The only frustrating part is setting them up. They never seem to want to unwind where I want them to and I end up staking them in with odd things.

I also have a rain barrel on my deck for my planter boxes. It’s empty right now, but another good rain and it should be full again. I got my rainbarrel from the REUSE Center. It came with a built in hose to fill up watering cans.

Connie Nelson says:

July 3rd, 2008 at 4:06 pm

The rain barrel I ordered months ago just came in. I hope to pick it up this weekend. Sarah d, do you hide your rain barrel with shrubs or something? I’m afraid mine’s going to look kind of ugly . . .

Susan says:

July 3rd, 2008 at 8:23 pm

Connie:
Your rain barrel won’t be as ugly as our system: whenever it starts to rain, my kids haul out all their sandbox buckets, my gardening buckets, and 2 old cat litter buckets and line them up under the garage roof dripline. After a half-inch rain, all the buckets are filled and there’s water for potted plants for a few days–or for starting mosquitos, whichever comes first.

Amy says:

July 5th, 2008 at 12:29 am

We had two soaker hoses split on us, frustrating.

Diane says:

July 6th, 2008 at 11:09 am

I’ve got a stat for you: 1k sqft of roof surface delivers 600-650 gal. if it rains 1 inch. So 1 55 gal rainbarrel on your downspout is going to get filled pretty fast, even a 1/4″ overnight will do it. I am trying the “milk jug trick”. I have 1/2 gal plastic jugs with a hole drilled through the cap. Filled them with water and upended them in the tubs where I’ve got tomatoes, peppers etc. Seems to be doing the trick and I’m not out there every evening watering.

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