When Should I Start Watering My Lawn?
Friday, January 22nd, 2010Another common question that comes up from my customers is, “When should I start watering my lawn?” The answer depends on a few different things. First of all your climate and local weather conditions have the biggest part to play in deciding when you should begin normal watering after the winter or off-season. The next factor would be the type of landscape such as what type of grass and/or shrubs you have.
Where we live in Florida we don’t really experience that long or harsh of a winter. The grass does go dormant and turn brown, but it still has a living root system underneath, which many people fail to realize. In our climate I advise people that should never really stop watering, only cut-back the amount of time and frequency that they do water their lawn.
Of course if their are freezing conditions, you obviously don’t want to water. But I would say that in this type of climate that a person should water their lawn and landscape at least once per week during the winter months.
If you do turn your system off for a few months, I would recommend turning it back on whenever the weather warms up slightly. You don’t need to set it back to automatic watering if you don’t want to, but can choose to water once or twice per week on the warmer days. For example, just recently in the Fort Walton, Niceville, Navarre, Destin, Crestview area we experienced several nights of hard freezes. This was about a week and two weeks ago, but today it is 65 degrees and I feel like having a bar-b-q!
Our weather tends to fluctuate like this during the winter. The lows have only been in the 50′s, but next week the lows will dip down into the mid 30′s and low 40′s and night. However there will still be some 60 degree days that feel great and a nice condition to water your landscape.
Watering at least once weekly during the off-season has other advantages than keeping your lawn and shrubs root systems healthy. It also keeps the many working parts of your irrigation system moving. Just like a car, if your system sits too long certain problems are bound to occur. This is especially true on sprinkler systems tied to well water. The iron and other debris tends to cake or gunk up the longer it sits and dries out. This causes problems such as stuck check valves and foot valves, heads getting stuck down or stuck up, nozzles clogging up, and other problems.
If you live in a more northern or colder climate than your irrigation system was most likely designed to be drained and/or blown out in the off-season so you obviously can’t water until your system is primed back up again. In the south and warmer climates we do not build sprinkler systems to be completely drained out. Many pumps can be drained, but I would recommend insulating them rather than draining them so that you can activate your sprinklers at least once per week.
