How to organize watering your garden yourself?
Few gardeners are fortunate enough to live in a climate where it rains in just the right amount and at the right time. Most still have to water their green pets. Watering a garden with your own hands is a laborious task. But if, in addition to hands, you put your head on it, then this activity becomes interesting and creative.
Possible options for watering the garden
Agricultural reclamation specialists have developed many ways to water a wide variety of crops. Not all of them are applicable in the garden. The choice of how to water the garden with your own hands depends on several factors:
- the need for crops grown in water;
- mechanical composition and moisture content of the soil;
- weather and climatic conditions;
- availability of water for irrigation;
- the financial capabilities of the gardener;
- vegetable garden area.
The main ways of watering the garden, which you can organize yourself:
- furrow irrigation;
- overflow watering in strips and checks;
- sprinkling;
- drip surface watering;
- subsoil drip irrigation.
Each option has its own advantages and disadvantages.
Sliding watering is simple, but degrades soil structure in flooded areas.
Sprinkling is convenient, but promotes the development of fungal diseases.
Subsurface drip irrigation saves water and time, but is expensive.
To achieve the best results with the least cost of effort and money, several watering methods are usually combined.
Automated garden watering
Automation, in principle, lends itself to all of the above methods of watering the garden. You can even assemble the necessary electronic circuits with your own hands, although in our time this hardly makes sense. Unless if electronics is your hobby or profession. The essence of automation lies in the installation of soil moisture sensors, which give a signal to special electronic devices to open or close shut-off valves on the water supply or turn on and off pumps.
It is unprofitable to automate a flood irrigation system for small vegetable gardens. They will be too expensive. And it is difficult to do without visual control of the filling of the furrows. Automating home sprinklers is much easier. It is only important to correctly position the sensors. But subsoil irrigation is best used in automatic mode, or at least install moisture sensors with indicators in order to know when soil moisture in the root zone reaches the desired value. Excess moisture is worse than lack of moisture.