Water is a resource without which we cannot live a day. From drinking and washing to eating, from cleaning the house to caring for the garden. Saving on watering is a great way to keep your wallet “full” and a planet will be grateful. Of course, you need to save wisely. So that your garden won’t suffer from this. Irrigation is especially important in regions with low rainfall. Unfortunately, water is not cheap these days, and it is not always available in the required quantities everywhere. But if you do not irrigate your lawn, flower beds, and container plants using the most time-saving and efficient methods, you may be watering unnecessarily. How to use water rationally so that it becomes possible to save it during irrigation? It turns out that everything is not so difficult! Here are some tips for saving water, time, and money in your yard and garden.
Use rain
If it suddenly rains, it’s time to collect the streams of water flowing from the roofs into barrels. True, before starting to do this, it will not hurt to wait twenty minutes – this will allow dirty water to drain from the roofs because only clean water should be used for irrigation. Of course, barrels placed under the gutters make the site less attractive, but in this case, it is quite possible to come to terms with this temporary inconvenience because as soon as the sun comes out again, the barrels can be removed.
Mulch instead of watering
In addition to protecting the soil from water evaporation and desiccation, mulch has a number of other useful functions.
It prevents the germination of weeds, minimising weeding, protects the soil from siltation and erosion by precipitation, and improves its physical characteristics.
In addition, a method such as mulching promotes thermoregulation of the soil surface, preventing it from excessively heating up in the sun or cooling during frosts and cold weather.
When decomposing, the mulching material enriches the soil with organic compounds and nutrients, creates favourable conditions for the life of soil organisms – the most important factor of fertility.
Water consumption control
One of the economical ways of watering is to install sprinklers, fan or rotary, although in this case, despite the possibility of adjusting the irrigation sectors, some areas of the garden area receive excess moisture. In addition, with surface watering, the likelihood of sunburn of leaves and damage to plants by jets is not excluded.
A great solution would be to irrigate your plants manually, but with the help of a good quality retractable garden hose reel. This way you can easily distribute moisture and make sure that every plant gets enough water.
Drip irrigation systems are a great way of saving water. With drip irrigation, water flows through thin tubes directly to the roots of plants, which receive it in very small, metered volumes.
At the same time, the moisture content of the root layer is kept constant all the time.
When using drip irrigation, the water consumption for watering one tree or a whole group of shrubs can be a couple of buckets per hour.
A matter of technology
And finally, to maintain soil moisture, there are agronomic techniques available even to a novice gardener. For example, the weighting of the mechanical composition of the soil – claying of sand and sandy loam. Light soils allow moisture to pass through well and dry out fairly quickly. Therefore, the introduction of a heavy substrate, clay minerals, perlite, as well as organic matter (peat, compost) allows you to increase the moisture capacity of such soils, improve their structure and retain water in them longer.
And the simplest agrotechnical technique is loosening the soil. No wonder this method is called “dry irrigation” because with a hoe or a rake you break the earth crust and thus destroy the system of thin soil capillaries through which moisture evaporates.
Conclusion
Despite the gigantic amount of water on the globe, estimated at 1.5 billion km3, fresh moisture reserves are only about 2% of this figure. Moreover, most of them are concentrated in ice and snow covers, hidden deep underground, in addition, significant volumes of water are polluted by industrial emissions. It is believed that more than a quarter of the world’s population is already experiencing a lack of freshwater for various needs. We need to reduce meaningless water consumption in every possible way. We hope that this article will help you in that mission.
