Watering Garden with Soaker Hose

In fact you didn’t have to work so hard to achieve a fruitful harvest…

For too many gardening seasons, we dragged the hose from bed to bed in order to keep our garden watered. We were slaves to dry weather, often changing our personal schedules to be in the garden to water a bed with starter plants. Care was taken to avoid watering the leaves of some plants, like tomatoes, to prevent blight, which meant we couldn’t just set a sprinkler and leave. Watering was done by hand since different crops had different water requirements.

Watering is one of those things that is a bit misunderstood. As you stroll through your neighborhood in the spring and summer, you are likely to spot well-intentioned people staring blankly ahead, pointing a spray nozzle straight at their plants and hitting them with a full, deafening blast of water. Or, the sprinkler on the front lawn is also watering the sidewalk and unsuspecting terriers and pedestrians.

Today, we simply turn on the water spigot and each bed receives a slow, steady flow of water directly to the root zones. Soaker hoses are laid on beds, delivering slow, steady dripping to the plant root zones. This saves us time, and also saves water up to 70% since no spray is lost to wind, and our pathways do not get watered. This is important because pathway weeds will dry up and require less work in weeding. Less work!

Soaker hoses can be laid beneath light mulch, like straw, so they’re not visible. We also use a battery-powered electric timer to turn on the soaker hoses, and to turn them off after a designated period. This enables us to be off-site, without worrying about watering our vegetable plots.

To our surprise, we’ve had more consistent gardening results since switching to the soaker hose and water timer system. The plants are bigger and the yield is greater. The slow, steady supply of water enables the roots to maintain a slow intake, feeding their natural absorption capacity. Our hand-watering practice, on the other hand, applied the water faster, and in larger amounts, which resulted in considerable water lost to runoff (which watered the pathway weeds) and less water actually being absorbed by the plant roots. We found that use of soaker hoses helped us achieve better garden production with less work.

What’s so great about a soaker hose?

Laying a soaker hose next to the base of your plants delivers water straight to the plant roots - right where you want it.

No more moving hoses.

No more standing and spraying plants.

You save money. Soaker hoses use much less water and deliver water more efficiently than sprinklers or the “point and shoot”   method. So you get a lower water bill in summer when water rates are the highest.

You have healthier plants. Watering at the root level instead of from the top cuts down on moldy leaf diseases.

Soaker hoses are a recycled product. Now you can water and be a do-gooder at the same time.

How long and how often do I need to water?

This will take a bit of testing and will depend on the weather and the type of soil you have, but try watering for 20 or 30 minutes once every 2 or 3 days. In really, really hot weather you might have to water every day.

To check to see if your plants are getting enough water, carefully dig down next to the plant into the root area. If it is moist, they’re good. If it’s dry, water.