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This photo illustrates why having a sprinkler set to "automatic" isn't usually the best idea. When set to regularly come on and off they end up going off on rainy days when water isn't needed, or on windy days when more water blows away then reaches the ground.
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The Irritation of the Irrigation!
By C.L. Fornari
In the desire to have beautiful lawns and gardens, more people install automatic watering systems every year.
While I’m the first one to encourage the pursuit of lovely landscapes, these sprinklers are usually set to go off too frequently, so they are not only squandering a precious resource, but are fostering diseases, creating weed-ridden lawns and producing unhealthy gardens as well.
In this part of the country our lawns and gardens will do well if we receive one inch of rain per week. That’s all it takes for our plants to do well.
A perfect rain is one that delivers this inch over the course of a twenty-four hour period, so that the slow rainfall breaks the surface tension of the soil and all of the water soaks into the ground instead of running off.
If Mother Nature provides an inch or more of rainwater every seven days, and you’ve mulched around those hydrangeas, you don’t have to water your property at all.
This includes the lawn.
Natural processes don’t always come through with that inch or more per week.
Many areas in the Northeast have experienced long, dry stretches during the past few summers, and many people have needed to supplement the rainfall with watering.
The problem is that more then a few are watering too frequently and too shallowly.
Continued...
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