Watering Best Done By A Schedule
Vegetables have trouble expressing their need for water. “Plants that need water and plants that are overwatered will have the same symptoms — the same wilting,” said Jennifer Fishburn, horticulture educator for University of Illinois Extension from her office in Springfield. “The leaves are going to weep a little bit.”
Not wanting to witness a cruciferous vegetable making an emotional scene — we’re stoic like that in the Middle West — I asked Ms. Fishburn how I should be watering my garden. I won’t say that her answer sounded all that complicated, but I will say that more or less everything I was doing by instinct was wrong.
I could probe down six inches with a screwdriver, she said, and see if the soil felt loose and dry or damp and dense. Better, she said, would be to follow a single rough rule: Established vegetables need an inch of water each week during the summer, either from rain or watering. And plants, apparently being immoderate things, like to gulp it all down in a shot — say, once a week. Those short, steady showers I’d been administering probably weren’t reaching the roots, she said.
