Water, the key-stone resource
If fossil fuels are the key-stone resource in industry, then water is the key-stone resource in the garden.
Your plants are totally dependent on water to transport all of the nutrients in the soil to its roots. You might have the most fertile soil in the world and your plants on the verge of starving because the soil is dry.
A thirsty plant can drive its roots deeply into the ground. It can usually get enough to stay alive BUT nearly all of the nutrients are in the top few inches of the soil.
The top layers of the soil are the first to dry out. Then nutrients in that layer are no longer accessible to you plants.
The plants might keep photosynthesizing and packing away carbohydrates but they will not visibly keep growing. The effect of a soaking rainfall can be dramatic. A Black Locust tree can push a shoot two-to-four feet after an extended dry-spell and subsequent denching rain.
It is a bit of a tangent, but irrigation techniques that conserve water by spot irrigating the plants (like trickle irrigation) do not wet the much of the upper layers of the soil. These irrigation methods benefit from ferit-igation where soluble fertilizers are mixed with the irrigation water.
Another issue with dry soil is that drought triggers seed formation in many species of plants. Those greens you were growing throw up a seed stalk, called "bolting" in the trade, and the leaves either become bitter or they turn yellow and start falling off.
Potatoes become knobby when grown in soil that is allowed to dry out. Each bulge is when the growing conditions were ideal and each constriction is when they ran out of water. Knobby potatoes are still edible but they can be a pain to peel.
Tomatoes that experience on-and-off soil moisture are more vulnerable to splitting. The fruit get packed with a lot of sugar when it is drier (which is usually a good thing) but then osmosis floods them with water when it becomes available and the skin cannot stretch rapidly enough to avoid splitting.
Bottom line: In many places, not paying attention to the moisture level in your soil results in a big hit to both the total production of your garden AND the quality.
Supplemental irrigation
The smart boys at the university have in-soil moisture meters. The earliest ones were blocks of plaster (gypsum) which changed electrical resistance based on moisture level.
As a home gardener, it is pretty simple to take your hoe and scrape down two inches (give or take a little) and see if your soil is moist, that is, dark.
Or you can squeeze it.
Or you can look at you rain-gauge a couple of times a week and if you don't have a half inch of rain...water your garden.
You have lots of options. You just need to figure out what works for you.
Container gardening
Because each plant has less soil to mine for moisture, the plants run out of water more quickly.
Irrigation is not "supplemental". In most cases it is a daily or near-daily thing.
Mrs ERJ worked at a place where somebody built a container garden on the south side of the brick building. It was a beautiful structure made from some two-by-sixes. It was certainly more attractive than the asphalt pavement it rested on.
Sitting in that reflector oven and completely cut-off from the soil beneath it by the black-top, it needed daily watering. It barely survived two day weekends and it became kale-chips July 4th weekend.
Interesting note about the spuds. Splains my problem, lol!
ReplyDeleteCould you expand on this please as my experience seems to differ?
ReplyDelete"It is a bit of a tangent, but irrigation techniques that conserve water by spot irrigating the plants (like trickle irrigation) do not wet the much of the upper layers of the soil. These irrigation methods benefit from ferit-igation where soluble fertilizers are mixed with the irrigation water."
Trickle irrigation please define, like soak hoses? Why do they not keep the upper layers moist?
In my hügelkultur beds I check soil moisture with a finger to check how moist they are. My low-tech rain gauge is a tuna tin that I dump as needed. I use compost mulch to suppress weeds and reduce water evaporation due to wind and sun.
I use side dressing of compost as well as PRN use of compost tea for heavy bearing or weaker looking plants. I've found that waiting until serious water stress that bugs and plant diseases really go wild.
Trickle irrigation like hose and discrete emitters. Emitters can be fitted with small hoses to move flow around or tucked into pots.
DeleteThe water never aerosols or is air-borne and is less of it evaporates before it hits the ground.
I'm still confused. That's why I asked Why do they NOT keep the upper soil layers moist.
DeleteAre you saying trickle irrigation isn't a good idea? Works really well for me.
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When we used to garden, we had installed 4" drain field PVC pipe vertically to water mature plant roots. The pipe were cut to 12" long, but we never knew if the water spread through the side holes matched the one at the bottom of pipe. We installed coffee cans at the bottoms to help contain the water. We did notice that it did cut down on the amount of weeding needed though.
DeleteThis is my biggest challenge. In New Home at best rain is unreliable during the Summer. My redneck experiment last year (hoses and a timer) worked okay, but I need to have a slightly better system.
ReplyDeleteDefinitely a challenge here. Some varieties of tomato are less prone to splitting, but all will split if rapidly going from dry to very wet.
ReplyDeleteKeeping a steady moisture level prevents the over splitting unless you get a toad drowning rainstorm. And even then, I get minor splitting for some of them and make them into chutney.
ReplyDelete