unless you actually set your timer
so that it skips a couple of days, it
will come on faithfully, overwatering your plants, wasting you money, and inviting plant diseases.
Fact: most people with garden irrigation overwater their gardens.
Rockery with succulents:
low to no maintenance
Sparmannia: usually found
in shade near streams
Regal Pelargoniums need low dew
High water needs areas
There should only be certain areas
of your garden that are high in
maintenance and watering needs.
Your rose garden, annuals, exotic
bulbs, lawns, and veggie garden
are among these. Try planning
your garden so that your high
maintenance areas are easy to
check from your home. It’s worth
having irrigation here if you don’t
like hanging around with a hosepipe, but I prefer to keep these
areas’ irrigation manually activated
rather than being on an automated timer.
That way, you can physically check
to see if your plants actually need
water, and whether irrigation is
working as it should when you
switch it on. I once visited a ‘water
wise’ gardening Fundi (who shall
remain unnamed) and found her
irrigation squirting water all over
the paving (not on her plants) owing to a detached emitter at six o
clock in the morning. Apart from
the waste of water, there’s also the
wasted electricity – and the plants
will still need to be watered after
Gazania rigens: anything but wet
soil
the ‘disaster’.
Create a ‘dry’ zone and use nature’s ‘technology’
Your indigenous plants chosen according to the natural conditions
in your garden shouldn’t need a
lot of fuss and bother to keep going. Yes, you may decide to help
them along in the hottest, driest
weather, but in general, they’ll pull
through regardless. If you use irrigation here, ensure that it’s not in
the same reticulation system as the
plants that need more water. That
way, you can activate your irrigation