How often we should be watering our lawns can be a puzzling question to many as we all try to ensure our lawns try to stay as healthy as possible with as much water may be necessary to keep them in the best of health. The simple answer to this question though is rather simple, we should water our lawns as least often as possible.
With that said, we don’t want to be running our lawns into the dust, we don’t want unhealthy lawns, or lawns with patches emerging, and we certainly don’t want to be seeing any parts of our lawns where the soil is visible, all such are signs of a sickly lawn of course, with lawn problems to emerge in the future if we don’t look after our lawns properly.
What we do want to do instead is to monitor our lawn’s health, and to let our lawns tell us when it’s time to water again.
The aim is that the lawn should remain in a healthy state at all times, if the lawn is looking the worse for wear or is experiencing problems, then we may not be watering the lawn enough, and may need adjust watering and other lawn care practices as required to bring the lawn back to good health again.
How Often To Water Lawns
For the sake of simplicity, let’s begin with the presumption that the lawn in question is in very good overall health, no disease, no bare patches, none or only few weeds, a good thatch layer and a green overall appearance.
We want to keep the lawn in exactly that same condition, so let’s continue all other lawn care practices the same as we always did, only looking to adjust our own watering habits.
So to adjust our lawn watering schedules or practices, what we want to do first is to forget what those schedules or practices are, entirely.
Now we want to stop watering the lawn altogether and not have a plan as to when to water next.
As the days pass, we want to begin keeping an eye on our lawn, looking for signs of stress, such as wilting leaves or a slightly off colour. Such signs are not bad in themselves, they are telling us that the lawn needs water, and so now is the time to water the lawn.
And when we do water the lawn, we want to water it very deeply, more water than what we normally apply when we used to have a set watering schedule in times past.
This is how we will water our lawns from now on, when they tell us they need another drink, and then to give them a very healthy drink.
The example just used of off colour and wilting leaves is a little extreme, but is used as an example only. If we let things go too far we can cause thinning of the lawn, as well as possibly making the lawn vulnerable to disease or weeds, or worse overall lawn health, all of which we do not want at all.
With experience we can begin to learn when the lawn is beginning to show obvious signs of stress, and to water the lawns as required and more deeply, and this is the very best way to water our lawns.
Why This Is The Better Way To Water Lawns
Many of us water our lawns frequently and shallowly. What this practice does is train the lawn to keep its roots closer to the surface of the lawn, always waiting for its next easily available source of water.
The most obvious worst result of this is if we cannot water our lawns enough in Summer due to water restrictions, and the lawn soil dries out and the lawn appears in poor health throughout the season. Also when we do encounter a sudden heatwave the lawn can become very sunburnt and quickly.
Whereas if the lawn had a much deeper root system it would have more water available to it at a deeper soil level throughout all the year and especially in Summer, and so these problems wouldn’t be occurring at all, and if they did then the results wouldn’t be as harsh.
And that’s exactly what we’re doing when we water less often and more deeply.
We’re forcing the lawn to naturally send its roots deeper and deeper into the soil.
When less water is available to the lawn at the very top of the soil profile the lawn will do the same as all other plants do, it will send out its roots deeper and deeper into the soil to find more water, and it will continue to do this up until it reaches its root growth potential of whatever type of lawn it is that we’re growing.
Lawn Watering Over Years
Over the year and the years, we should find that we are in fact using less water on our lawns when compared to how we watered our lawns in the past, even though we’re applying more water each time we do water, because we are watering far less frequently than we ever used to.
Even in Winter, if a region still experiences a length of time between rain, a frequently watered lawn may still need to be watered, whereas a lawn trained to grow deep roots shouldn’t need any watering at all over Winter, and perhaps even a month or two before and after the Winter season too, but that of course would depend on other factors such as lawn type, environment, soil quality, shade levels on the lawn etc.
Utilising this far superior method of watering our lawns should also give us a much healthier lawn throughout the year too, in all seasons.
Automatic Reticulated Watering Systems
Obviously the set and forget irrigation systems that many people have installed for their lawns and gardens would need to be adjusted for this new watering system. While it would be impossible to give instructions on how to program each different type of watering station, some basic guidelines will point us in the right direction.
The idea here would be to turn off automatic watering programs for the lawn, and to instead monitor the lawn health as outlined earlier in this article, and then hit the manual watering button as and when required, and to increase the watering times for the lawn watering section of the reticulation.
An alternative to try for lawn owners with automatic watering systems would be to try setting watering times to come on less often during the warmer seasons, but to apply more water at each watering session. In this example we might try to water our lawns once a week in Summer instead of twice, and to water to 30 minutes instead of 20 minutes. This of course is just an example and you would need to find the right watering times and watering amounts that are suitable for your own lawn, as we all know that no two lawns are alike or require the same amounts of watering or frequency of watering. It’s trial and error to find a better way of watering to water less often and more deeply, for a more water efficient and healthier lawn. Be sure to keep monitoring the lawn health and when it’s telling us it needs its next drink of water.
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