I water my raised beds twice weekly, DEEPLY, if there's no rain that week. If there is some rain I adjust accordingly.

We had one inch several days ago and 1/4 inch two nights ago, so this week I haven't watered, which is a huge blessing.

I have 18 gallon tubs that I mixed some of those soil moisture crystals, and I also water them twice weekly. They actually seem to hold moisture better than my raised beds.

When I do water, I WATER heavily and deeply. I run the hose in the dirt until I see runoff, then I move on to a new spot, then I move BACK to the first spot. Repeat until you can't take it anymore or the soil is fully saturated.

I do other things (weed, pick produce, yell at kids) while I am waiting for each spot to take in enough water.

Hope this helps!

Jo

What kind of soil are they in. What kind of pots?

Sammy,

I water however long it takes for the soil to be evenly moist throughout the pot. How long that takes depends on how large the container is (most of my container-grown tomatoes are in 20-gallon pots or larger), how many hours of sunlight the plant receives, etc. For the plants in the ground, it can take hours with the soaker hose set at a low rate, but it varies a little from bed to bed because the ones at the west end of the garden drain/absorb water more quickly than the beds elsewhere in the garden. With clay soil, if it is very dry, sometimes you have to water in stages or the water runs off instead of soaking in. I don't water by a formula but rather tailor the watering to the needs of each specific pot or raised bed.

It was 103 degrees here today with a heat index of 106 and the wind was gusting in the 30s on and off throughout the day and blowing steadily in the teens, so the plants were drying and wilting like crazy. I watered the plants in containers very early this morning and then I watered in mid-afternoon right before leaving to drive to a wedding (an OUTDOOR wedding!) in Texas. Otherwise, I would have watered the containers after dinner if they needed it. I try to water the in-ground plants deeply once a week, but if no rain is falling I up it to twice a week or more often if the conditions demand it.

Each year, if I feel like I 'know' whether it will be a very wet year or a very dry year, I try to tailor my soil mix in my pots to either drain faster if I expect a very wet year or hold moisture longer if I expect a very dry year. This year I tried to mix up a mix that would hold moisture longer, but it is so hot and windy here and no rain has fallen in over 3 weeks, so I feel like I'm watering a lot.

It is important to keep the growing medium evenly moist whether the plants are in pots or in the ground because swinging back and forth from very wet to very dry encourages blossom end rot by stressing the plants' vascular system. BER is essentially a problem with the way that calcium is distributed inside the plant by its vascular system. So, when the growing medium is dry and the plant is stressing, it cannot absorb enough calcium from the soil so instead, in the interest of ensuring the plant itself survives even if that comes at the epense of some of the fruit, the calcium leaves the fruits and flows back into the plants to meet the pressing need of the plant to have calcium. It is at this point, with the furthest point of the tomato from the plant (the blossom end) lacking calcium, that BER develops. Keeping the soil evenly moist helps prevent this from occurring, but sometimes in very tough summer conditions, even careful attention to watering is not enough to completely prevent it.

I haven't seen any BER on plants in pots this year, likely because I am always and forever watering them. I have had it on one plant in the ground in the big garden---on a "Heidi" at the end of a row. I guess I've been letting her get too dry.

With the kind of weather we're having now, I'm already looking at the calendar and counting the weeks and trying to figure out how much longer I'll keep watering all these tomato plants if no rain falls. It won't be for much longer though because in the total absence of rainfall, I don't think I can water them enough to keep them happy while at the same time keeping DH happy about the water bill. So, having to choose either DH's happiness, or the tomato plants' happiness, guess who wins.

I hate, hate, hate, hate, hate this weather. Everything here is burning to a crisp and no real relief is in sight. In this week's newspaper, our local newspaper publisher wrote in his weekly column about the drought, the heat, the lack of rainfall and started prodding the County Commissioners to implement a burn ban. Usually we can get all the way through summer without a burn ban until Sept. or Oct. or even Nov. The fact that he's talking about one now reinforces what I'm seeing here---that our county is in a rapidly deteriorating situation involving both soil moisture levels and rapidly curing/drying vegetation.

I have been watching one particular crack in the ground to track soil moisture. A couple of weeks ago the crack appeared and I noticed it was about 1/4" wide. By last weekend or early this week, it was 1/2" wide. Today I looked at it and it varies from 1.5" to 3" wide at the surface. In all the dry years here, I've never seen a crack widen so much so quickly and I consider it a bad omen.

We did, at least, get good early fruit set on well over half our tomato plants so we are harvesting tomatoes almost daily. I picked about 50 yesterday. However, when the fruit already set on the plants ripens, I likely will stop watering if there is no new fruitset. In this heat, if fruit is not going to set, there's no point in continuing to water for weeks and weeks and weeks.

Dawn