Separate schedules for beds vs lawn

I live in a fixed schedule city. Can only water on three days.
I had been doing everything on just two days because it was sufficient, but wanted to add that 3rd as an extra for my beds. But I’m wondering now if I should pull the beds from the two days, and make a separate three day schedule for the beds alone.
the reasoning is this: the two day fixed schedule seems to account for how much watering the system thinks the beds need for two days a week, and the separate one day seems to work independently of that other schedule. so now the beds are getting TOO much water.

If I just put the beds into it’s own three day fixed schedule, and the lawn areas into its own two day - I’m I correct in guessing the beds will get a more thoughtful calculation of how much water they will receive?

hope this makes sense.

Generally speaking you should have separate schedules for each different type of vegetation. So, yes, make a separate schedule for your beds. But the calculations will not be improved. They will just be watered more often than the grass. Thus you can make adjustments so as to get the right amount of watering.

BTW, with three days a week of allowed watering, you might want to look into a Flex Daily schedule. Works pretty well here in So Cal.

2 Likes

I hope this isn’t too off-topic, but when I set my schedules up the other day, the instructions said that Flexible Daily should only be used if you have “3 or fewer restricted days.” If you can only water on 3 days (I have the same situation, also in So Cal), wouldn’t that be 4 restricted days? Am I misunderstanding this?

I am using Flex Daily for my lawns (4 zones.) Recently the City website said I could water Mon, Wed, and Fri. so I decided to try Flex Daily. (I was using a fixed schedule.) The result is that the individual watering times have increased over what I had used with the Fixed, but the frequency went down. For august the lawns were watering about once a week.

Over all the new schedule is using less water. (This just proves that dictated water saving rules can be counter productive.) The longest “gap” would be 2 days–Saturday and Sunday, so I am not too concerned for the July climate. I think that the worst that might happen is that Flex decides it has to water each day that is not restricted. Then it would essentially become a fixed schedule. I expect even longer intervals this winter.