Watering in high temperatures

Hi Team,

I’m concerned about my system not watering enough so I have been putting it on manually. Here as follows shows the temperature over the next few days will be.

Now before I had my system I would water the garden every ~3 days in the summer, added to that if it were going to be over 40 degrees I would normally water everyday.

I don’t have faith that if I left it to Rachio to water, in 5 days time that all my plants would be alive!

Is there a better setup for me that would include these “emergency” watering?

My Gardens are a mix of Annuals, Perennials and Natives, the gardens are on flex.

Cheers,
Mike

@mikewhitton

A mixture of plant types is typically not the ideal scenario for flex daily since the core of the software uses the plant root zone depth to determine watering frequency and duration. If you look at the soil moisture chart for your zone it is showing your bucket being depleted, and it depletes at the same rate irregardless if you have different plant types.

If you think its close there are a couple ways to have it water more frequently.

You can go to advanced zone settings and adjust the crop coefficient up a bit (10%?) This will make the plants thirstier faster. You could also decrease the plant root zone depth which will also make the plants thirstier faster, but will also subtract some minutes since it is watering a little more frequently.

The great thing is that as you adjust these parameters you can look at the calendar or soil moisture graph and see immediate changes.

In future versions of our software we are going to make these adjustments simpler, but these will more than likely come after our big software release this year.

Hope this helps.

:cheers:

@mikewhitton, I would consider editing your Allowed depletion if you haven’t already. It defaults to 50%, but for your gardens, you might be better off reducing it to 20-40%. Your watering durations will decrease, but the frequency will increase. Another option for “emergency waterings” is to empty the zone’s moisture level as a manual watering will be factored into your moisture level calculations – see the video at the bottom of this support article for details on how to empty the moisture level.

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Thanks @emil, didn’t even think of those options.

:cheers:

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@mikewhitton, I second @emil on editing your Allowed Depletion for annuals / perenials – based on some doc I found online, I set mine to 25%, while I left my lawn at 50%. I live in hot North Carolina, and changing that allowed depletion helped a lot for my plants.

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Thanks everyone, have adjusted the gardens only to 25% depletion, lawns left at 50% but might actually up this to 60-70% as I feel that in winter time it was watering a little to much, first I will wait till I’ve gone through the whole summer season before making any changes next winter.

Thanks for the article on emptying the zone moisture level, that makes a whole lot more sense, I did notice my “emergency waterings” were putting my zones into 110% capacity so it makes far more sense to empty the zone instead.

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