What is "Deep Watering"

[Derald]

What does the expression mean to you? In your garden, how do you know when you've accomplished the goal?

[DogDiesel]

It means to me , watering, So as to promote deeper root growth. Or watering, So that X amount of depth of soil beneath the roots , Stays wet in spite of evaporation in the soil closer to the surface. Long enough for the plants to take advantage of it. By Advantage I mean, The plants will grow roots down farther to reach the wetter soil when the soil above has dried out.

How do I know when I've accomplished it. I learned it by trial and error. By under watering and overwatering errors. But The soil slightly below the surface . stays wet for three days or more, when the surface soil is dry.

Diesel.

[songbird]

since i like to rattle on and i'm waiting for the time slot at the watching paint dry competition...

more than a squirt for a few minutes with the hose. more than a single pass with the watering can. more than a light spray from the spray bottle.

if the watering quantity for a plant says one inch per week, then deep watering would be twice or more that amount.

in other words. it depends upon the plant, soil and situation, but the major difference to me is time. deep watering takes time to get the water down in the soil.

one example:

when we've done tomatoes the past few years we've used 5 gallon buckets with holes in the bottom, dug down into the soil a foot and a half. when we watered if there hadn't been any rain for a week or more we'd fill the buckets too. they'd take a day or two to empty (as we had the holes rather small). that was deep watering. we surface watered in addition to filling the buckets.

if we'd just gone with surface watering we could never get enough water down fast enough through the clay to meet the demands that all the hot weather we had was putting on the roots. as it was we still had a little BER (the clay was rock hard when we planted, i was surprised the plants did as well as they did).

songbird

[songbird]

haha, house staining was done quite a while ago, the soybeans are partly shelled, i'm at about 15lbs. the lack of bad weather (not complaining at all there :) ) has meant i hopscotched via a bunch of other projects to one other big project on the waiting list (posted under horsetail on rec.gardens). i will get back to the soybeans next week if the weather forecast is accurate.

before i could get going on the one project i had to finish burying a lot of organic materials and bags of shredded leaves a friend gave us. i've probably moved 20 tons of dirt the past three weeks and another 5 tons of crushed limestone. and before i could get to all this digging and burying i had two other gardens i excavated more clay from underneath and leveled them and relocated a bunch of tulips. um, i guess i've been busy, haha, and the weather has been mostly beautiful for being outside in the gardens.

i was speaking in terms of general population usage. :)

:)

i'd be adding clay (a little goes a long ways, as i've found via my experiments in breaking it down in the other direction). all the neighbor gardens in sandy soil around us were baked out last summer. ours held up.

we don't go that far, but i wouldn't mind something else someday.

songbird