Does less water mean greener lawns?

Too much water is just as bad for your lawn as too little. It can lead to fungal diseases and overgrowth. On top of that, gallons of water goes to waste. How can you tell if you’re watering too much? The solution comes from the brilliant minds at Texas A&M University in the Texas AgriLife Extension Service. Dr. Guy Fipps has developed a system to tell you how much water is too much.

You have to know how fast your system puts out water. And we call that the precipitation rate. The best way to do that is to put out devices, put out catch cans, and measure your precipitation rate. In the Aggie Catch Can, there’s an instruction sheet that will tell you how to lay out your catch cans. If you run them 30 minutes, then that’s a nice easy number to use. Turn off your irrigation system. On the little pad, you go out and you read what we call the catch volumes, how much water you’ve got in each can. You’ll take the average of those, and that’s over 30 minutes, so you multiply that times two and you have your precipitation rate in inches per hour.

The final step is, you go to the TexasET website. And the first thing you do is you select your station. And for beginners, you go to the home watering calculator, and it prompts you for the information you need. You put in your precipitation rate, calculate, and it gives you your run time. You can probably improve the quality and the looks of your yard while the same time reducing your water use. So you’re looking at reducing 40% to 50% of the water that you might be using now.

Maintain a healthy yard with this simple method. Set out the containers for measuring. Water your yard for 10 to 30 minutes. Mark the water levels. Calculate your irrigation rate online. It takes less water than you think to get greener grass on your side.

For homeshowradio.com, I’m Tom Tynan.

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