Water Saving Tips for the Vegetable Garden

Summer can mean hot temperatures, little rain, and water restrictions—all challenges to keeping your vegetable garden healthy and productive. If you’re looking for ways to water smarter or garden during a drought, use these water-saving tips that include the best time to water, how to deep water, use ollas, collect water, and recycle water.

After a long, cold, and wet winter, the garden is baking in summer sunshine. Where I live, we’re having one of the hottest and driest summers in memory. Fields that are usually lush and green are yellow and withered, and let’s not even talk about the lawn. My plants are thirsty, and if I want the garden to survive, I’ll need to start watering and taking serious action.

However, there’s a challenge. With drought comes public notices about reducing water usage and avoiding watering the lawn. There can even be restrictions on using the hose or sprinkler systems. That raises the question of how we vegetable gardeners can keep our gardens watered while trying our best not to turn on the tap. If you’re looking for ideas, too, these water-saving tips for the vegetable garden will help.

Water in the Morning

The time of day you water makes a massive difference in how much moisture reaches your plants. Watering in the day’s heat can mean that quite a lot of it will evaporate from the soil long before it reaches plant roots. That’s why watering the garden is best done while temperatures are cooler and the sun isn’t fully up. The longer that moisture can stay in the soil, the better chance that plants have to soak it up and stay healthy.

The best time to water the garden is early morning. Working outdoors will be cooler, and the soil and plants will be able to absorb enough moisture to get them through the hot day. If you can’t water in the morning, then evening is second-best. The reason that morning is better comes down to garden pests, fungus, and disease. If you water in the morning, the sun will dry out the top layers of soil and your plants before evening falls. This means fewer slugs and snails will be out and about destroying young plants. It also reduces the chance of microbes causing infections and disease.

Mulch the Soil to Reduce Evaporation

To keep moisture locked in the soil, use mulch. A two-inch layer of compost, aged manure, straw, grass clippings, or mushroom compost will help keep your soil from drying out, and you’ll also not have to water your garden as much. Using mulch is one of the smartest ways to keep your garden healthy and hydrated. It’s also a way to protect soil from erosion, support soil organisms, and add nutrients.

It’s easy to understand how it works if you’ve ever left something lying on the ground. A piece of wood, a plastic bag, or something else. When you move it, the soil underneath is usually noticeably moister than the soil around. It works with both solid objects and materials like compost! I love using compost as mulch, and it’s one of the main reasons my garden is so bountiful.

In hotter regions and where there’s drought, it’s best to use a layer of straw, wood chips, or grass clippings over the soil and/or compost. It works as a heavy-duty mulch that will lock moisture in and rot down over time. Adding these as mulch in wetter regions can lead to increased numbers of slugs, though, so keep an eye on it. The space between the mulch and soil creates a nice place for them to live and breed!

Deep Watering Plants

Another thing that helps during dry weather is to deep water your plants. Spraying them for a few seconds with a hose does very little to keep them watered. Want to see for yourself? The next time you water this way, dig around in the soil where you watered. It’s often bone dry, almost directly underneath.

Deep watering means directing a gentle spray of water at the soil under a plant for as long as it needs to saturate. I usually slowly count to thirty when I’m deep watering containers or individual plants in the garden. It’s much easier to do so with a hose, but you can also use a watering can. Also, avoid watering the leaves. Plants don’t absorb moisture from their leaves, and wetting them can waste moisture and potentially cause/spread disease.

Use Seep Hoses and Drip Lines

To help your garden thrive not only this summer but for many more to come, consider installing seep hoses or irrigation. You will be grateful you did! It can mean a good amount of leg work, but they can be automated and save so much time later on. Manually watering can be hard work and time-consuming, especially when you want to be enjoying the good weather.

Seep hoses and drip line systems work by allowing tiny amounts of water to seep through holes or sprayers along their length. It takes longer for the water to get to your plants, but you can end up saving a lot more water by using them. You can lay them on the soil surface or bury them just underneath, and they slowly moisten the soil around them. Both can be attached to rain barrels or your tap, and a timer attached between the water source and the line can regulate when the water comes on.

Watering with Sprinklers

Providing you have a good layer of mulch and you water in the evening, a sprinkler can be an invaluable water-saving asset. Figuring out how long you should run it can be tricky, though. I remember the sprinkler being on in my grandma’s garden throughout the summer. It would be around dinner time, and she’d move it around every now and again to make sure it all got a good soaking.

An easy way to work this out is to place empty glasses around the area your sprinkler will hit. Turn the sprinkler on and leave it on for at least twenty minutes. Measure how much water is in the glass afterward, using a ruler. A vegetable garden needs about 1.5 inches of water every week. If there’s only three-quarters of an inch in the glass after thirty minutes, add enough time to make up the extra half inch. In this case, that makes sixty minutes of unbroken sprinkler watering.

I prefer not to use sprinklers, but when I do, I put it on very early in the morning, leaving it on for an hour before moving it to another area. I have a large garden!

Collect and Save Rainwater

Saving rainwater is incredibly satisfying, and it comes in handy if you do a lot of hand watering. You can save rainwater in rain barrels, in dipping tanks, in ponds, IBCs, or underground cisterns. The most common way is to attach a rain barrel(s) to the downspout of your home’s guttering. They can be adapted to collect water from sheds and greenhouses, too.

Having a rain barrel can be very helpful for watering plants, and the soft water is ideal for seedlings and houseplants. In a drought, most saved water doesn’t last very long, though, especially if you have a lot of plants to water. I know someone who buried a one-thousand-liter rainwater storage tank in her one-acre garden. She was incredibly pleased with it, but found that the water inside lasted less than a week in the first drought. Just something to keep in mind.

Use Ollas

Ollas are a simple tool that people have been using to water crops in arid climates for hundreds of years. Terracotta, as a material, is porous and wicks water from inside out, which is why some pots can get moist after you water them. This can happen underground, too!

So, if you sink an unglazed terracotta vessel in the ground and fill it with water, it will slowly release water to the soil directly around it. You can purchase custom-made ollas, but they are costly. It’s better to make DIY ollas.

Use Recycled Water

If you are trying (or have to) save water, you can use recycled water to water your plants. Ordinary dish soap, shampoo, and soap are harmless to plants when diluted in water. That means that you could save your dirty dishwater and bathwater for use in the garden without any fear of it harming your plants. Using a plastic tub for dishwashing makes taking it out to the garden very easy. In the case of greywater from the sink, tub, or washing machine, you may have to either bail it out or install custom plumbing.