Today, we are going to share with you some tips about overwatering and how we can prevent overwatering in your gardens. Overwatering can happen at any time during the year, but especially when the temperatures start to get cooler.
CHAPTERS:
0:00 Prevent Overwatering
0:59 Timers & Irrigation Systems
1:38 Signs of Overwatering
5:15 Get Started
TRANSCRIPT FROM VIDEO:
Hi, my name is Lindsey and I’m here at the Urban Farm. Today I’m gonna share with you some tips about overwatering and how we can prevent overwatering in our gardens. Overwatering can happen at any time during the year, but especially when the temperatures start to get cooler. It’s important to remember that our plants don’t need as much water as they needed in the summer months. So here in Arizona we definitely have very hot summers and we use a lot of water to keep our plants alive. But during the winter, the soil retains a lot more moisture and we don’t need as consistent frequent watering as we do in the hotter months.
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We use timers and irrigation systems here that do all the watering for us. We just have to set the time and the frequency that we want them to be watered. So in doing that, we can easily change the amount of water that we apply to our plants in the winter just by changing the time. So instead of five minutes of watering, maybe in the winter we do two, but it’s important to monitor as we go because we wanna make sure that the changes we’re making to our watering are actually helping our plants and still are the right frequency. So here are some things that we can look for in order to make sure our plants aren’t being overwatered.
Plants that are being overwatered, while often show these symptoms, they’ll have brown leaf edges or brown spots on their leaves. They’ll have yellow leaves that are wilty. If you see leaves that are yellow and really wilty, but they’re not crunchy, that could be a sign of root rot, which is one of the most sentimental things to happen, um, with overwatering, and it isn’t reversible usually. So something we definitely want to avoid. Also, brown tips can be a sign of overwatering. Also, just looking at the soil. So when we have overwatered sections of soil, the remain damp for a period of time, or they’ll have physically active water just sitting on the top. We also wanna make sure that we’re not seeing pests. So things like Nats will be drawn to especially wet soil and to soil that has perhaps roots that are rotting. So if you see nats or flies by your soil, that can be a sign of overwatering too.
So here is an area that typically struggles with overwatering just because it receives a lot of shade. We have an orchid tree over us, so this area doesn’t get as much sunlight to actively use for evaporation and just to get rid of some of the excess water. But we do have plants here that like a lot of water. So our Barbados cherry and our surname cherry, and also our starfruit here is a tropical plant that enjoys having water, but we wanna make sure that the soil isn’t too wet.
So here the other day, it rained and I haven’t turned on the irrigation since. When we have natural occurrences like rain, we don’t really want to turn on our water in the winter, we can easily over water. So something I’m noticing here is just when I’m touching the soil, it is still very wet, that it’s sticking to my fingers and it’s very compacted. So this can be a sign of overwatering that we definitely wanna correct. We can break up the soil a little bit, but just taking a shovel and adding some aeration in breakage into there. Also, just adding a mulch or something would help with this. And you can see here it’s a little bit green, which is just a sign of that like mossy layer starting to form. And this is definitely a sign that this area has gotten a lot of just sitting water. So this is something we’re gonna wanna correct so we can make sure that the plants in this area stay healthy. We can see that our star fruit is getting some yellow leaves. So it just means that with the rain and with the winter temperatures and not as much photosynthesis and respiration that this plant is just getting a little too much water, then what would make it happy?
So these are just some things we wanna consider, especially in the wintertime. It’s really easy to forget about that change from summer to winter to, you know, summer to fall to winter to see how much water you need to actually be giving your plants. But by using some of these systems and by looking at what the ground and what your plants are telling you, there are some really clear signs that will give you a good indication of if you’re overwatering or not watering enough.
