Scheduling an irrigation system can be a tricky business and a costly one if not done correctly. An ideal schedule for your typical residential home or business must take into account the following: lawn, grass type, soil, plants, trees, shrubs, flowers, vegetable garden, sun, shade, and slopes. Add this to knowing how quickly the sprinkler system delivers water (application rate) allows us to determine how long and how frequently to time and set the controller. For many of us that have very heavy soils or clay soils typically the sprinklers can run for only a few minutes before the water puddles. Once this happens it's time to back off on the run time for that zone or for the entire system. Combine a heavy clay soil with shade and you can almost turn the system off except for extremely dry conditions. Conversely, sandy soils in a sunny area and you have to water every day for long periods. I have seen these two conditions on the same property and fortunately most controllers have more than one program allowing me to set different run times/zone and different amounts of days/week for watering each area. Your irrigation timer or sprinkler controller is your best friend and is the brain to your irrigation system. Get to know it especially after you have invested $1000's into your landscape.
April 2009 Archives
Record breaking temperatures this past weekend put great demands on trees and shrubs trying to leaf out. Plants need a lot of water and nutrients in order to produce leaves and flowers. They need alot of water to move nutrients from the ground to the tips of their branches. Turf can grow several inches a week and each blade of grass is more than 90% water. If you haven't turn your sprinklers on then now is the time. Have the rotary sprinklers run 30-40 minutes every other day. Spray or mist sprinklers should run approximately 10 minutes every other day. Drip irrigation can run every day for 30 minutes. If you see the water puddling up on top of the ground then you are watering too long and cut the time by 10% until it stops puddling. When the weather cools off and it feels like spring again then you can lower your watering time by 50%. Overwatering can be as damaging to your landscape as not watering at all.
