drip irrigation.. running minimum 18 hours per day ... well ..

ken

Drip irrigation, soakers, sprinklers. Ditto 18 hrs a day. Also watering cans and hand watering. Not planting anything.

Sandy

Maybe those lost hostas have just gone dormant. I'm hoping this is what's happened to my 'Peanut'. I'm continuing to water him although the leaves are dead. I'm doing all of the above except the drip irrigation to keep my hostas alive. It would be nice if hubby would agree to adding taps to the irrigation system at the edge of my hosta beds... maybe if I made him do the hand watering?

Temp yesterday was 96 F and no rainfall anticipated all week. Around 10 pm we had a cloudburst for only 5 minutes. My daughter didn't get it in another part of town.

Hot and dry here but the thunderstorms keep finding me. Probably got an inch or two last night.

Many days I just keep moving the lawn sprinkler around. The bare-roots planted last fall are visited with the watering can regularly.

The thing is is that I have been watering almost every other day. So yesterday I decided to dig holes to place cannister in for deep watering and ground totally dry. I could not believe it. I had been faithfully watering.

I found that recently when I dug a hole too, Val. Makes you wonder where it is all going. Are you watering by hand or by sprinkler?

coll - so many soil conditions so no one can just pop an answer. I look up and so far my trees are all still green and not dropping leaves,but do have drooping leaves. I'll bet I won't be able to say that in two weeks. Trees probably are at the top of the pecking order when it comes to water in the soil. But the plants towards the bottom are more durable. When not enough water a tree can't go dormant - it just dies. A 150 year old tree just dies. But in general it is relatively much harder to kill a hosta. And much easier to keep alive by watering.

Les

What we saw last year with our drought was dead trees like Les said. Most of the dead trees that were not really well suited to our climate. However, on well suited trees, we had the loss of limbs. My next door neighbor doesn't water at all as far as I know. She has huge pecan trees. All of a sudden, a big limb would just break off - and come crashing to the ground - full of leaves and seemingly healthy. There was an article about it in the paper. They shed limbs so that they don't have to work so hard to keep all those leaves hydrated.

bkay

Actually, aside from the ones I split a bit too late in the season, mine are doing pretty good. Honeybells has been getting a watering about every other night, but they are new to me as of about a month ago (mature, given to me by a gardener who needed them moved due to some contracting work that would have squished them). The hosta bed gets a deep watering with the soaker hose about 1-2x a week. No wilt or look of unhappiness about any of the ones I bought earlier this year or the clumps that were just moved and not split in that bunch. I might have lost an eye from Cameo, that is in a pot separate from the bed though, and the other two eyes from it are in a different pot and are growing well. I have one clump below some trees in a "holding area" of sorts that I have watered maybe twice this month and it is green and happy.

We are in an official drought, I think we've had only one day of rain so far this month, and that was a wicked storm that blew through in about an hour complete with a downpour (too much at once, not a good soaking rain) thunder, wind, lightening-the whole shebang.