by Briar Miller

Created on: February 12, 2010   Last Updated: February 17, 2010

The first and most important solution to any problem in the vegetable garden is - more compost.  Keeping your vegetable garden well watered can be a trial, especially in a very warm climate and even more especially if your soil is very light and free draining.  Plenty of organic matter, humus, or compost, in the soil improves its moisture retention properties enormously.  Compost also makes a very good mulch.

Mulching is a very important tool in keeping your vegetable garden moist.  If a garden is not mulched in some way, a huge proportion of any water you do put on, will evaporate.  Not very efficient.  Compost is an excellent mulch with the added benefit of adding nutrition to the soil.  Straw can be used, but only if your soil is very healthy because it leeches nitrogen from the soil as it decomposes.  This is okay when growing legumes, or when the plants get to the fruiting stage, but not too good when you want them to be putting on leafy growth. Green manure crops such as lucerne or alfalfa make a wonderful mulch which can be applied around any crop, as do weed tops as long as they have been separated from their roots.  All of these things can be dug in eventually, adding to the health of the soil.  Mulches which are also light excluding, such as black plastic and cardboard help with water retention, as well as keeping down weeds.  You can plant directly through these mulches when your plants are big enough.  The drawback is disposing of the mulch afterwards. In the same vein, growing plants quite close together so that the leaves shade the soil, and low-growing under crops serve the same function, and maximize your production. 

Moving on from water retention, to actually watering your vegetable garden, there are a few important principles:

First of all, any watering should be done towards evening if the sun is shining.  This is particularly true of young plants and seedlings. The sun shining on the water drops on the leaves can scorch them very quickly.  Also, most plants do their growing at night, so watering in the evening ensures they get the best use of the water before it starts to evaporate the next day.  The roots need the water to take up inside the plant.  The leaves can't use water from the outside.  

Second, watering must be very thorough, and go down quite deep.  Some vegetable roots go down as far as two feet.  When we just moisten the top couple of inches, we end up with shallow rooted plants that are addicted to watering, rather than going down deeper into the soil where there is likely to be more moisture present anyway.  Another disadvantage of surface watering is that it can lead to panning and an accumulation of mineral salts on the surface of the soil, though this can be remedied by a good organic mulch. Deep watering may be unachievable across the entire vegetable garden, but individual plants can be adequately watered by sinking a plant pot into the soil next to it when planting.  This enables us to pour quantities of water straight to where it needs to go.  Another approach is to install a trickle hose that winds through your vegetable garden and gives water constantly by capillary action. Sink it a couple of inches rather than leaving it lying on the surface.

If you need to water in the summer, you might as well make the most of it.  Fill a water barrel with nettles for leafy growth and comfrey for flowers and fruits, then use the resulting tea when you water in the evening to make your plants even more pleased to see you than they were already.

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