How much time do you spend watering your garden each summer? Do you water it weekly? This post goes along with a blog post I wrote: 5 Ways to Transform Your Garden into a Low Water Garden. This post here on steem will focus on one specific aspect of reducing how much watering you need to do.
You often hear that your garden needs the equivalent of 1 inch of water each week. That actually is not true--at least you don't need to do that watering each week.
The soil can hold massive amounts of water if it is not degraded. Luckily there are a number of ways to improve degraded soil and even improve healthy soil.
The organic matter in the soil is what allows soil to hold large amounts of water. Unless your soil is very dark it is likely only made up of around 2 or 3% organic matter. But if you increase the organic matter you can increase the amount of water the soil holds by up to 25,000 gallons per acre (per % increase in organic matter in the soil).
If you want to water less you need to focus on building the percent organic matter in the soil.
Passive Versus Active Watering
What sounds better? Watering every week or working with nature to store the water in the soil?
I like to break watering into 2 camps: passive and active.
Active watering is basically what you likely think of when you think about watering. Things like a watering cans, sprinklers, drip irrigation, irrigation in general, flood irrigation, etc. This type of watering takes you doing something on a regular basis or setting up some sort of infrastructure to automatically water for you.
Passive watering on the other had is when nature does the watering for you. This could include rain but for our purposes it is better to think about passive watering as the water stored in the soil that is accessible for your plants. I tend to also include features like swales on contour and unsealed ponds since these features focus on slowing, spreading and soaking the water into the soil.
This is very different than regular irrigation where the water is brought to the plants as surface water.
With passive watering nature does the watering for you. I would rather focus on this type of watering! As a homesteader I have enough to do each week without having to water the garden!
The best way to do this is to build the percent organic matter in the soil. But how do you do that?
Building Organic Matter in the Soil
Yup, I'm going to talk about mulching again. But that is just one method to increase the percent organic matter in the soil.
While mulching your soil is a great way to build organic matter you also need to stop degrading the soil. If you are tilling your soil on a regular basis then you are actively reducing the organic matter in the soil. So before you start mulching make sure to stop tilling.
In addition to regular mulching it is also best to chop-and-drop your plants instead of hauling off the cut material. Cutting any dead plants at the base instead of pulling out the roots in the fall will also help. This way the roots stay in the soil and decompose in place.
You want to add organic matter through mulching but you also need to stop removing organic matter by hauling away cuttings and dead plants. If you don't like the look of chop-and-drop just cut it up into small pieces and it won't be very obvious.
Here is a summary of the main points:
- Mulch the soil.
- Practice chop-and-drop.
- Don't pull dead plants--leave the roots to decompose.
- Stop tilling the soil.
If you do these 4 things you will see the percent organic matter in your soils improve each year. There are other techniques that also build organic matter but these 4 are some of the easiest methods to implement.
Additional Ways to Use Less Water
Hugelkultur beds is another way to add organic matter to the soil. Check out the link at the end of this post for more info. This hugelkultur hedgerow produced a lot of vegetables through a summer drought with no watering once the plants were established.
Make sure to check out the blog post that goes with this post. In that post I cover these 5 methods for reducing how much watering your garden needs:
- No tilling
- Gardening with perennials
- Using mulch
- Blocking summer winds
- Creating late-afternoon shade
You can also use classic permaculture methods such as swales on contour, terracing, and unlined ponds to slow, spread and sink surface water. But if your soil is lacking in organic matter most of the water from these methods will not be held within the soil and will still runoff.
So can you stop watering all together? That will depend on the climate for your area. If you get summer rains then I think yes you can build a system that does not need watering. This is even possible in my area where we get a ton of winter rains but very little to no rain in the summer.
The first picture of this post shows me holding some russet potatoes. I grew those in wood chips through a summer drought and I never watered them.
But even if you can't stop watering I can guarantee that you will be able to reduce how much water your garden needs if you use these methods. But it might take a couple years if your soil is degraded.
What do you think? Are you going to try to water less by using these methods?
Thanks for reading this and good luck gardening!
Weekly Blog Post
- What You Need to Know About Permaculture Zones
- Companion Post on Steemit - Getting Started With Permaculture Zones
Related Blog Posts
- Hugelkultur Beds: The Best Raised Beds for Your Garden
- 5 Ways to Transform Your Garden into a Low Water Garden
- What is Mulching? The Complete Introduction to Mulching
- Plant Once With Perennial Vegetables
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