Lawn Watering 101: When & How Much? Preventing Drought | Turf Tips with Dr. Brad 

Great question Linda, we see your predicament. We do want to minimize the duration of leaf wetness to provide optimal growing conditions for the plant. Traditionally, we see the worst disease pressures when folks water in the early evening or at dusk, extending leaf wetness many hours through the night. Your best bet would be to run your system early in the morning. This way, you are providing the lawn with water in a way that won't leave the grass wet for extended periods of time. Ideally, watering would be done by the time the sun is high and evaporative forces that result in wasted water are at their max. Depending on the volume delivered by your system, starting irrigation an hour or two before the sun comes up and allowing it to finish as the sun is rising is a great place to start. The need for water is paramount, so we often have to be creative with our timing. All this being said - while scheduling is important, the amount of water is priority #1. Provide appropriate amounts of water first, worry about potential disease issues second.

Great question! If our watering schedule and required water volume calls for us to water for 30 minutes on a given day, it's definitely best to water for the full period of time in the morning, as evening watering sessions can promote excessive leaf wetness overnight, which increases the risk for fungal disease growth. Now, it's also important to consider our watering schedule on a weekly basis. If our goal is to provide (for an example) 1" of supplementary water for the week, it's a great idea to split this into multiple watering sessions across the week, with these watering sessions occurring in the morning. A great place to start is by watering every other day for 1-2 weeks, and then switching up our schedule to watering every third day for 1-2 weeks, and then back to every other day, etc. This type of schedule helps to train our turfgrass roots to reach deeper into the soil, which makes for healthier turf that better withstands stresses from disease, insect damage, drought, heat & more. To summarize, our first concern is providing the lawn with the proper volume of water. Our next concern is frequency (deep and infrequent), providing this necessary volume of water over fewer watering sessions as opposed to watering every day. Our last consideration is timing of our watering session, with morning watering being ideal. If you have any questions we're here to help! Thanks for tuning in!

We don't offer any installation for underground irrigation systems, unfortunately - this video is just for education purposes as watering is super important. We'd recommend searching for "underground irrigation installation near me" on Google, you should find some results!