sprinkler

If you are watering your garden with a hose and a spray wand, stop. You might be thinking that you are providing your plants with the moisture they need, but unless it is soaking a newly germinated seedling (or carrots waiting to germinate), what you are actually teaching your plants to do is to set shallow roots, because that is where the water is. You are teaching them to be sub-acutely, chronically water stressed.

What you actually need is a sprinkler, and you need to get in the habit of providing your plants with an inch of water a week, unless you are sure they already got it from rain. I don't bother having a rain gauge, I just run the sprinkler, but I have the luxury of being in the wet Northeast. Want to know how much your sprinkler produces in a given amount of time? Set a tin can or something else with straight sides inside the drop zone and come back in an hour. You can see how much it filled up and extrapolate from there how long you need to run the sprinkler.

A sprinkler run once a week for long enough to provide an inch of water is far better than a hose every day, because the water behaves differently. With a hose, the water is fast and furious, but brief, and so it stays at the surface, barely wetting the top couple of inches before it moves on. A sprinkler, on the other hand, happens slowly, and patiently, and it strikes in deep because of that very slowness. So the plant roots dive deep in response, seeking out the water, and because of this they gain access to a far greater slice of soil and all the nutrients it contains than plants that have shallow roots because that is all they were encouraged to grow.

I prefer a three armed spinny sprinkler, and I like the brass kind on the metal stalk that has a spike you step into the ground (mine is the brand Orbit, purchased on Amazon). The stalk keeps the sprinkler head above most crops, so the water comes down evenly. And I prefer the spinny kind because there is nothing to break and it produces a nice even pattern within the circle it waters. I'm not concerned about overwatering if I need to overlap coverage to get to everything, and I'm pretty casual with how long I run it. But the very fact that I can turn it on and forget about it IS the thing that makes it work so well. Your plants will thank you.