Maintaining a garden or landscaped area can be a joyful experience. Whether you are growing flowers, vegetables, fruits, shrubs, or anything else green and alive, there is nothing that feels quite like the dirt in your hands and nurturing something beautiful and living.

Of course, gardening has its challenges, too! Many home-based landscapers and gardeners struggle to get everything just right.

Complicating factors include:

• Prepping the garden and landscape bed for planting at any time of year
• Growing the right plants in the right soil
• Avoiding native and invasive pests
• Pruning, trimming, and tending
• Weeding
• Ensuring that everything has the right amount of water–not too much and not too little!

Let’s Talk More About Watering Your Plants!

Rain Bird has been helping gardeners and landscapers keep their flowers and plants perfectly watered since 1933, so we have quite a bit of experience in this area! We work with people all the time who understand the importance of ensuring that each plant has the right kind of water.

Knowing how much water to give a plant requires some horticultural knowledge and experience. These are some of the questions we encounter:

How much water should I use when I water my plants? The goal of watering your plants is to dampen the soil to a depth of about six inches. This nourishes the roots and encourages downward growth.

How often should I water my plants? If you are watering by hand, you want to water once or twice a week. Even though it’s okay if the surface of the soil dries out a bit between waterings, you want to make sure the deeper soil remains moist.

Is there a wrong way to water plants? Familiarize yourself with the kinds of plants you are watering. For example, it is much easier to over-water succulents than it is to do the same to most typical potted plants. Another tip is to water the plants at the ground level. You also don’t want to just depend on the rain, because rainfall is less predictable than your own watering habits. If you’re not getting at least an inch of rain every week, you should be adding water to your plants to make up the difference.

How can I avoid over-watering, watering at the wrong time, or under-watering my plants? And how can I avoid wasting water? Today, many gardeners are not just concerned about keeping their gardens watered. They also want to make sure that they are being responsible stewards of our natural resources. Reducing water usage is good for the environment and the checking account, so it makes sense that so many people are interested in having more control than just turning on a hose and letting it run for a while.

A drip irrigation system is a great solution to inefficiency and wasted water. Go a step further by adding a hose end timer to control your drip watering system to ensure that your plants have the right amount of water at the right times!

Make Your Life Easier with a Hands-Free Watering System

If you struggle with keeping your plants evenly watered, a hands-free watering system may be the way to go! These irrigation systems are also useful for anyone who is busy, managing a large garden or landscaped area, or wants to have a lot of control over the conditions their plants experience.

Hands-Free Options

Rain Bird offers several options for gardeners who are interested in going hands-free. Hands-free essentially means that you are no longer directly watering plants with a hose, using a clunky watering can, or moving a sprinkler system from place to place.

Instead, you will be using pre-placed irrigation stakes and micro-sprayers, often on a scheduled timer, to ensure that you are in control of your plants’ water intake: when, where, and how much.

Drip irrigation is one of the most efficient ways to deliver water to your plants’ root systems. Perhaps the easiest way to control your drip irrigation system is to use an electronic garden hose watering timer. This device simply threads onto your garden hose faucet and lets you program when to turn on and off the flow of water. Just connect a run of tubing and drip emitters in various sizes to regulate the amount of water you desire.

If you have an existing in-ground irrigation system installed in your yard, another option is to convert one of your pop-up risers to a drip system. Instead of losing water to overspray, give your plants the exact amount of water they need. The Rain Bird Emitter Conversion Kit helps you conserve water and save money by watering your plants with drip irrigation. This kit contains everything you need to convert a pop-up spray head into a water-saving drip system with six spot watering emitters that can provide water savings up to 40%

Another option is the Landscape and Garden Drip Watering Kit. This comprehensive starter kit contains a variety of drippers, micro-bubblers and micro-sprays – everything you’ll need to water a garden or landscaped area with up to 80% water savings. This is another great way to reduce overspray and runoff and help you gain more control over where your water goes. Use the included parts to assemble your drip watering system and connect it to a hose-end timer for easy automation.

Rain Bird also offers automated sprinkler controls!

The Rain Bird system can be automated and controlled by the ARC Series WiFi Controller. This automated system controls up to 8 sprinkler zones and is easy to install in both indoor and outdoor installations. With app-based programming, this is the easiest and most efficient way to manage your plants’ hydration and nourishment.

Feeling Overwhelmed? We Can Help.

If you’re finding all of these options a little overwhelming, but you definitely want to benefit from hands-free watering systems, we are here to help!

Rain Bird’s customized Sprinkler Design Service brings our expertise to your yard! We love to make watering systems a breeze. All you need to do is to take a few measurements and share details about your yard, and one of our experts will prepare a fully customized plan to help you re-think your current irrigation methods.

We look forward to helping you design your irrigation system!