I have five zones, four are grass and the fifth zone is for trees and bushes and such. Should the fifth zone be in its own schedule?
If so where is this written down anywhere? If not anywhere, why not?
btw, I’m using the gen 3.
What schedule type which you like to use? That will determine how to break up your zones.
https://support.rachio.com/hc/en-us/articles/115010541468-How-do-I-create-a-watering-schedule-
I’m using flex daily. Thought I put that in there (my bad)
Also, the web soil survey says my available water is 0.07. Should I change advanced settings to reflect this? By default it’s something like 0.17 i think. Will this make a difference at all?
My issue is I find it hard to believe somehow they get all this information for the soil across the entire united states? How the heck do they do this? How do they know? Seems crazy to me. How accurate is it?
With flex daily all zones will water independently based on their soil moisture levels. Make sure you double check the watering times for the tree/bush zone. Mixed crop types are really difficult since trees can have really long roots while bushes can have much shorter roots. That zone might not be the best for flex daily.
I would start with the default. Using an AWC .07 will have you watering every day.
It’s a good starting point, that’s about it 
One last thing I would do is double check the soil moisture graph on one of your zones (you can simulate up to two weeks of watering) and make sure it looks reasonable in relation to watering frequency.
Hope this helps.
Thank you. I will stick with flex daily for all zones though. I’ll watch and see if the trees or plants suffer.
The web soil survey provided a similar AWC for my lot. I found that the web soil survey did not match the actual top 6" of soil on my property. This is not surprising. The builders probably hauled in topsoil from somewhere else, as I don’t think turf grass would grow well in the native soil.
On the bright side, if you start with 0.07 you only risk watering too often.
2 Likes
I keep my flower zone in one schedule, my drips in another schedule and my lawn in yet another schedule. While the system could let them run all in one schedule, I prefer this for a couple of reasons. I have my lawn schedule set up so that it starts around 3:30am and can finish a bit before sunrise. It also doesn’t water on Thursdays as that’s the day the mowers are here. My flower schedule runs at 8:00am, so that they have water for the day (and it runs almost every day). And my drip zones start at 9:30am as they can run during the daytime without a problem, and they can water anyday of the week.
1 Like
How do you take care of your grass? I plan to put grass in my garden to make it look greener and more beautiful, but I don’t know very well how to take care of it. I read some articles on the internet, and I even bought some seeds and weed fertilizers from The 5 Best Kentucky Bluegrass Seeds for Your Lawn, but I don’t know yet which type of grass to apply in my garden.