The Complete Guide to Landscape Design, Renovation, and Maintenance
by Cass Turnbull

WATERING
The most common mistakes I see are made by those people who do not water enough or by those who water too little too often. This encourages roots to stay on the top layer of soil instead of going deep to where the water is stored. When these people go on vacation they are surprised to find that their grass has browned--all in a week--and they may not get the connection between drought stress and the fact that their shrublets succumb to root weevil or die in the freeze.

Deep, infrequent watering encourages deep root systems on grass and on all your shrubs and trees. If you start early in the year and water your lawn for an hour or two once a week, it will be able to take it when you go away for your summer vacation.

Automatic Irrigation
Another error occurs when people--including city bureaucrats--"save" money by omitting automatic irrigations systems for parks, public facilities or commercial landscape. The money spent paying the crews to drive to public parks and lay out, move and turn off sprinklers every day soon (within two years) exceeds the cost of putting in an automatic system, plus the cost simply continues forever. Automatic systems are more reliable than people, and they can water at night or early morning so they don't interfere with sunbathing. Automatic systems make for low maintenance, and save you money in plant replacement costs, too, if they are properly run.

When you put in a new automatic system, pay the extra costs for durable materials. Be sure every inch of your yard is covered even if there is no plant to water there now--you may wish to put one in there later. When digging to put in irrigation, avoid cutting off all your tree's roots on the trenched side. You will kill it. Where necessary, it is possible to dig or auger straight under the tree roots near the trunk to avoid cutting them. There are even auger bits that will go through solid rock. An old-fashioned way is to drive the irrigation pipe under tree roots with a sledge hammer.

People commonly kill their trees or cause them to blow over as a result of severing major roots when installing irrigation.	The contractor can safely auger under major roots near the trunk.

Other things to remember about your irrigation system is to have your shrub beds and lawn on different control stations. This allows you to turn off your shrub sprinkler so it won't wash off your Roundup, say, or to conserve water by shutting down your lawn sprinklers, if there is a water crisis.

If you are installing an irrigation system, put your hand-turned water spigot up high enough to get a bucket under it. When you plant your yard, the temptation is to hide the spigot with a shrub directly in front--don't. You want to have easy access to your spigot. A thorny shrub--like barberry or pyracantha--is to be especially avoided.

An automatic irrigation system comes with a controller box which you or your irrigationist will set or program to come on at certain days and times. Some are simple, almost like kitchen timers, others, the more intimidating push button types, remind me of the cockpit of a 747. You may choose to put a little map of which stations are where inside the controller box lid, and perhaps some instructions. Or maybe you just want to memorize where the "off" switch is and then write in the phone number of your irrigationist.

A semi-automatic irrigation system.

Sometimes shrubs grow up and block the water from reaching its intended area.

Poor lawn coverage often results when the turf grows up over the sprinker heads.

Poor lawn coverage often results when turf grows over your sprinkler heads. In the spring, use a knife to cut the turf away from the heads.

Once the system is in good working order, it's easy to forget it. Don't. I spend a certain amount of time training my customers to spot trouble before it's too late. Old irrigation systems will, from time to time, break. Usually, the only ones that the customers notice are the broken heads in the middle of the lawn because a giant brown patch develops in the middle of the green field. There are often fairly obvious signs that are overlooked until very obvious ones, like dead plants, catch the homeowner's eye. If you are weeding through your bed and the soil goes from moist to bone dry--notice it. You may have a station or head not working. An eroded hole developing around a head indicates a break at ground level or below. If you see what looks like a dry rivulet of mulch or dirt particles on your sidewalk, it may mean that you have a midnight "gurgler" or "gusher" or "geyser," parkese terms for broken heads or pipes, causing minor flooding as you sleep. To check this out, just turn your system on "manual" and go through the stations and take a close look at what is happening. When you find the break, turn that station off and call the plumber.

This handy irrigation device allows you to put two hoses on one spigot. A similar device allows you to shut the water off at the hose end.

Hand Watering
If you are too poor or too foolish, as I was, to pay for automatic irrigation, you will find yourself stuck with hose and sprinkler. Even here you will find there are ways to ease your maintenance workload--they, too, are unfortunately directly correlated with initial financial outlay. The most useful of these gadgets is a mechanical timer for your hose. It looks and works much like a giant kitchen egg timer. It attaches to the spigot and then your hose screws onto it. Part of the great hassle of hand watering is that you have to hang around to turn it off. And you have to remember how long it's been on before you move the sprinkler. With the auto-timer, you simply spin the dial to the desired time (or, actually it measures gallons of water), and then just drive off to the grocery store or go to sleep, or clean the house until you hear the water shut off. Then you will remember to go move the sprinkler. There is even an electronic-type timer for hose and sprinkler watering that fits between the hose bib and the hose. You can program it to come on for, say, an hour every third day.

Another handy device to put on between your timer and the hose will split the water. You can now attach two hoses to the same faucet. This is useful if--like me--you need to run one hose to the front and one to the back. This way both hoses stay in place, you just flip a tiny lever to move the water from one to the other.

Hoses
The garden hose--now there's an instrument of the devil. Just try to coil them neatly--they won't stay that way. Try to lay them flat--they curl and kink. Move them, they catch on corners, rocks or tree trunks. Or, after you drag them to a new location, you find that you have flattened the flower beds or knocked over the flower pots. One help for this latter problem is to place rocks or stakes strategically, at the leading edge of flower beds to keep the hoses in their proper paths. And the most frustrating experience of all is to go to attach the hose end to the sprinkler only to find that someone has driven over it and squashed the metal end, rendering the hose useless. Hoses!

Buy the heavier hoses for your yard. They kink less and reduce the frustration quotient. When a hose is "kinked," if you are not familiar with this term, it is folded over, stopping the flow of water. When you turn on the faucet but find that no water is coming out of the sprinkler,you must retrace the hose to find the kink. Kinking a hose with your hand can be useful if you are hand watering and you want to temporarily stop the flow of water. You just bend the hose back into a loop and squeeze it together. This, however, can predispose the hose to kink at this spot later on. A new gadget in the hardware store is a hose-end manual shut-off. No more back and forth to the spigot to change sprinklers or reconnect hoses.

The worst hoses for kinking are soaker hoses. These are the ones that act as sprinklers because they have holes in them. They are used to water long skinny places or to run under trees and shrubs in order to get the water down to their roots. Soaker hoses are good for plants that are prone to fungus disease on their leaves, like roses and dogwoods. They water the plant's roots without giving the disease organisms the damp leaves they love.

Until recently, soaker hoses were built flat with holes on one side. As a gardener, you spent a lot of time making sure the hose was resting perfectly flat, no kinks, hole side up, usually walking, or more like skating, on it to get it right. What a device of torture. A great new type is now available called "Spray and Soak."___ It is made of a soft material that collapses when not filled with water and it has holes all the way around. It is tube-like when full of water, and flat when empty. This makes them a relative dream to move, store and lay out. In my yard I leave a network of these laid out in the shrub areas where they are half hidden and never have to be moved to mow. These soft "Spray and Soak" hoses are not to be confused with "Leaky Hose___" which is stiffer and not designed to spray, just to soak. For the large grass area I use a standard oscillating (back and forth) sprinkler.

Snap Systems
The final investment you may choose to make is to buy snap-on type ends for all your various hoses. Once you have all your various hoses and sprinklers in place you will find that you spend the bulk of your time screwing and unscrewing hoses to hoses and hoses to sprinklers. The Gardena___ system will convert all this to an irrigation system that works a lot like pop-beads. Hose and sprinkler ends just snap together.

Correct Amounts of Water
I get into trouble from people who are concerned about water conservation by recommending more water. They have a good point. One way to cut down your water needs is to plant drought-tolerant plants. A well-planned garden will also group plants with similar water and soil needs together.

Exactly how much water you need to use will depend on numerous factors. Sandy soils need more water and more frequent watering; raised beds require more water; plantings on the sunny south or exposed to wind require more. Intelligent use of mulch and increasing the water holding capacity of your soil by adding organic amendments, is a very, very good idea. Small plants, like annual flowers (marigolds, impatiens, petunias) require more frequent water, but not so much, because their roots are nearer the surface. A big old tree may only need attention once during the drought. Leave a hose on a trickle in the root zone, perhaps all night. This is a surprise to many people--trees can and do die from drought, succumbing as much as a year or two later.

Compaction
If the water doesn't seem to want to percolate down into the ground, you may have compacted soil. This is a common condition in very old and very new homes. It is the result of fifty years of foot traffic, rain and tree roots without the relief of organic matter, in the former. In the latter, compaction is the result of bulldozers and other heavy equipment driving all over. It is especially easy to compact soil by driving on it, walking on it or working it when it is very wet. Compacted soil has had all the air spaces squashed out of it. It's hard to dig, like clay.

Moss in your lawn, especially if it's a sunny lawn, is often the sign of compaction. The cure for compacted soil in your shrub bed is, you guessed it, amending with organics. To help alleviate compaction in your lawn, rent a power tool called an aerator. It looks like a tiny steam roller with hollow spikes on it. It cores out hundreds of small holes. To get water or fertilizer down to the roots of your big old tree, it may even be necessary to drill holes with a power drill and a big long auger.

Signs of Stress
The most important information in this chapter is the advice to water when it is needed. Some automatic systems have a sensor that will keep your system from coming on when it's been raining. Really neat, huh? For you hose and sprinkler waterers, learn to read the signs of thirsty plants. Professional gardeners commonly anticipate the time of year to start nagging their customers to water. This is because we see plants start to dry out long before homeowners do. Rhododendrons, in particular, fairly scream their heads off asking for water. A very happy rhododendron's top-most leaves on each branch will point up. A contented rhody's top whorl of leaves are more or less horizontal. A stressed-out plant, from cold, drying wind or no water, will hold its leaves down. When it's in big trouble, they even curl inward.

On other plants, signs of drought stress are leaves that look dryer and lighter in color, feel crispy to the touch, or whose leaf tips or edges are uniform light (or dark) brown in color. Light rain during the summer can lull you into a false sense of security. The best test, as you know, is to dig your finger down into the soil and see if it's damp. Another tip-off is high temperatures, high winds and many days without rain. Oh, the poor plants, so many die needlessly through their owners' neglect of the obvious.

Less Water
On rare occasions your plants may benefit from withholding water. These are ones growing in areas known to contain root-rot organisms. Often, but not always, these plants are in poorly drained soils. Some junipers and maples get root rots fairly often. Madronas and native western dogwood will benefit if their roots are not kept moist, say, by being in a regularly watered lawn area. They are adapted to dry summer conditions in their native habitats. Put these with other plants that like it dry, and water less in that area.

SUMMARY
Water deeply but infrequently.
Invest in manual irrigation aids:
(1) water timers
(2) heavy hoses
(3) soaker hoses
(4) water splitters
(5) snap together systems
(6) hose end shut-offs

Invest in automatic irrigation systems
(1) Activate your automatic system early in spring.
(2) Take the time to visually check each station for trouble. Use a paper clip, penknife, and two wrenches to fine tune your system.

Look for trouble:
(1) Signs of plants dying of thirst are dull yellowing, crispy leaves.
(2) Is your soil moist two inches down? Use your finger to dig down and be sure.

Things that affect water needs:
- Is plant a drought or heat lover species? Less water.
- Is plant a shade or water-loving species? More water.
- On a slope? More water, slowly.
- On the south or west side? More water.
- Windy out? Greater water need.
- Soil have a lot of organics? Good.
- Mulch used? Water deeply.
- Tiny plants? Shallow roots? Less water more frequently.
- Big plants? (trees) Deeper roots, deep water less often.
- New transplant? (Year or two?) Needs more water. Insufficient water is a major cause of plant death, even from seemingly unrelated causes.

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