SUMMER · 4 MIN READ
You are probably watering wrong
Ten minutes every evening is worse than an hour once a week. Here is why.
Frequent shallow watering trains roots to stay near the surface, where the soil dries out fastest. The plant becomes dependent on you, and the first week you go away it dies.
Water deeply and infrequently instead. For most established beds that is one long soak a week — enough to wet the soil 20 to 30 cm down — rather than a nightly sprinkle.
Check it rather than guessing. Push a finger, a trowel or a screwdriver into the bed an hour after watering. If it is dry at 10 cm, you did not water for long enough.
Water the soil, not the plant. Overhead sprinklers waste most of it to evaporation and wet foliage overnight is how you get powdery mildew and blackspot.
Morning is better than evening, and both are far better than midday. If you can only do evenings, water the ground and keep it off the leaves.
New plantings are the exception to all of this: they genuinely need frequent water for their first season while the roots leave the original rootball. After that, back off deliberately — a plant that is never made to look for water never grows the roots to find it.
Written for zone 5 in Simcoe County. If you garden somewhere colder, on sand, or in a frost pocket, come and ask — the answer changes.