Bursts of Watering Get to the Root of Bone-Dry Lawns

If lawns, flower beds, ground covers--or anything else for that matter--do not look as green and healthy as you suspect they should, it is probably not a great mystery. It’s a good guess, at this time of the year, that they are simply dry. Perhaps not on the surface, but a few inches down, where most of the roots are, you will most likely discover that the soil is as dry as dust.

Don’t feel too bad about this little slip-up because even a few of us who are supposed to know what we are doing made the same mistake this dry year. A week ago I discovered that my lawn was bone dry. I could push my finger into the soil and it seemed wet but as it turned out, only the top inch of soil was getting watered; the rest was like cured concrete.

How I discovered this was with a tool that I consider indispensable--a soil sampler. Larger nurseries carry these rather expensive devices (I know of no mail-order source). It is a simple hollow tube, with one side cut away, that you push into the ground (if you can; if you can’t that’s a good hint in itself). Pull it out and you have a core of soil to examine and what I found was very dry. If you want to save the considerable expense of purchasing one, you can also do this with a spade, pushing it in and simply leaning back on it for a look at the slice of soil exposed, but the soil sampler gives a better picture.

THE TECHNIQUE

The solution is not to turn on the sprinklers and let them run for an hour, but to run them in short bursts. Turn them on for five or 10 minutes, then off. Wait a half-hour. Turn them on again, then off, and then wait. And so on. Each time the water will soak in a little deeper. Turning them off and on keeps the water from running off into the street, into a low spot, into softer ground somewhere. As the day progresses, keep checking the soil with the sampler, until you have forced the water at least a foot deep and preferably 18 inches.

In flower beds or among shrubbery, you can use the same on-and-off technique using a portable, hose-end sprinkler if you do not have a sprinkler system installed in the beds.

By the end of this weekend, you will probably have everything thoroughly soaked, if you start now. Sunday evening you can do one more good deed for your garden--fertilize.

Any inexpensive granular fertilizer will work--the kind sold by the bag with numbers like 10-6-6 or 8-6-4 on the back. That first number indicates the percentage of nitrogen, the most important plant food. Scatter it evenly, following the instructions on the package as to amount, then turn on the sprinklers and the water will carry it into the ground.

On lawns, use a lawn fertilizer that has more nitrogen in it (lawns are heavy users of nitrogen) and apply it with a spreader or by hand and then water thoroughly. Don’t put on the fertilizer until you are sure that ground is thoroughly moist or it will burn the already stressed plants. It is a good idea to give them a day to perk up--the reason for waiting until Sunday evening. And be sure to water throughly after applying the fertilizer, to wash it off the foliage and into the ground.

I can almost guarantee that by next weekend you will see the difference, if you remember to water several times during the week to keep the soil moist. After you have succeeded in re-wetting the soil, it’s important to keep it wet for about a week, then you can return to your regular watering schedule.