Watering advice: wash, rinse and repeat
October 2, 2015
Some of the best advice I can offer clients of the Dallas/Fort Worth area and home to the lovely clay soil of a lot of north central Texas is watering your lawn advice.
Because most of the soil in Dallas/Fort Worth is clay soil it tends to hold water longer than a lawn of say sandy soil and then when it dries out it becomes hard (like a brick hard) when subjected to the very hot heat we have here in the summer.
READ MORE
Therefore when water is applied in the initial minutes of watering it tends to run off, not soak in, resulting in a large amount of water being wasted. Therefore it is BEST to water very SLOWLY in the summer especially. By that I mean run the sprinkler system several times but for a shorter amount of minutes than normal. For example if you normally water 15 min/zone try running the system thru 1 complete cycle at 5 minutes per zone. This will result in some initial run off but once the zone moves onto the next zone and the area sits it will begin to soften.
Once the system has run all the way thru wait 30-minutes to an hour and run it through all the zones for 10 minutes. The ground is much softer now and the water will soak in giving you the deep watering you want and need. Most controllers can be programmed to do this for you so once you set it you don’t have to think about it again until fall when you need to cut back on the number of days and amount of time you water.
The vast majority of people in Dallas/Fort Worth don’t understand this and the vast majority hugely over water their lawns every year resulting in the waste of one of our most precious resources and also causing a myriad of problems with their grass—mainly a fungus for St. Augustine grass, drowning of Bermuda grass and the weakening of many shrubs.
