Watering your plants
In the dry tropics, every plant should be watered every day (although small plants in pots during winter could be fine if watered every 2 days). Plants can get by with less (e.g. when you are on leave), but they will not flower or grow. The Municipalities water twice a day and some people also do this, but most of us do not have the time. To water a large garden could easily take 2 hours every day, 7 days a week.
Obviously, if you have large beds, it is a good idea to put in a drip irrigation system. In the past, I have divided large gardens in to 8 zones. With 2 taps, you can water 2 zones at a time. 30 minutes per zone takes a total of 4 hours each night. Yes, drip irrigation takes a lot longer than a hose, but you are only going out every half hour to switch over the hoses (but if you forget to turn off the 2 hoses and leave them on all night, this gets very expensive!). Putting in a drip irrigation can require a great deal of thought: trying to work out how many plants you can put into 1 zone, taking in to account that next year, they will be bigger and so require more water. If you put in too many drips, the water will not reach the plants at the end of the hose. You need to plan the position of the hoses to cover all the plants, deciding where to put in T-junctions, so you can keep the hoses as short as possible (water pressure drops along the hose). The amount of water each plant gets depends on how many drips you give it.
For beds containing large numbers of annuals, it is better to put in sprayers (but if you put in too many sprayers on to one hose, the water pressure will drop and they will not spray). Although the photo shows big sprayers for grass, you can get all sizes of sprayers and ones producing different shapes of sprays. Generally, annuals are better done by a hose, since the amount of water they need changes during the year. Keep the drip irrigation for the bushes and perennials. Drip irrigation is not very successful if you have pots. For an expatriate, moving house is a fact of life. I am on my 6th house in the last 23 years and each house requires building a garden from scratch. Keeping your plants in pots thus has its attractions. You move your garden with you. I have 400 pots, some of which are quite large trees (e.g. the 3 m high Frangipani in the photo). Watering pots with a hose is fast. |