Last year I installed an automatic watering system and I was thinking about doing the same thing this year, but then I decided to water by hand instead. There are many reasons and many lessons I learned from going through the process and I will try to outline those here.
The main reason I decided to install a watering system last year was because I was working in Autsin for five weeks and I did not think it would be feasible to find people to water for me for all those times (but I will have to do something similar this year). Five weeks in Austin and other usual summer trips meant asking for a lot of help. So I did some research and decided on a soaker hose based system with a four zone timer.
In case other people are considering whether watering system is worth your effort here are my impressions.
What I did not like:
1) Concerns about failure – this was the biggest problem. My system failed three times at different points. Twice I came home with water running down the street because connectors failed (once before the timer so it could be going for a while). Once the goof plug at the end of the line came out and the water was coming out of the end of the soaker hose instead of the sides and messing up the pressure on the whole bench. What’s worse is that knowing that failures have occurred kept me worried about whether it is going to happen again. It definitely took the pleasure out of the automation. And after all that my timer failed – I checked it in the morning and everything looked fine but when I got home in late afternoon the trees were super dry. The batteries were fine, the program was correct, but I am certain they did not get watered and it was a hot day. I pulled the batteries out and put same batteries back after I checked them and it worked well the next day. I tried figuring out what happened but it remains a mystery.
2) Less control – you definitely don’t have the control you would have with hand watering. Being able to adjust the amount of water to differences in temperature, moisture, rainfall, types of trees, stages of development (e.g. did you just de-candle the tree) makes it less optimal. Some of those issues can be adjusted, but I don’t think it can be adjusted to the point that you can get to with hand watering.
3) Not being able to move the trees easily – because I would attach the soaker hoses with wire hooks to the soil it became easy to move the trees as well as rotate trees. This is not a big problem, but it definitely diminished my ability to work on trees easily.
4) Less contact with the trees – not watering every day, or twice a day, made it easier to ignore trees. I did not get to look at my trees every day and so some things were ignored. It would make it harder to spot problems early.
5) Uses way more water than hand watering – I noted that my water bill was higher than usual and more water was ending up on the ground instead of the pots. I think the soaker based system uses less water than sprayer systems, but it is still more than hand watering, in my opinion.
6) Difficulty with fertilizing – I fertilize using tea bags and I constantly struggled with placement of hoses over the bags, around the bags, under the bags, etc. Somehow, I could not quite figure it out so that the pots with bags would get watered evenly and enough water would go through the bags.
What I liked:
1) Not having to ask for favors and rely on others – this was the main reason I installed the system. I still had to ask people to check that it has not failed but I did not have to find people to water twice daily.
2) Flexibility with schedules when at home – when I hand water I have to be home at certain times, but the system freed me from it. I could water by hand in the morning and set a timer to water in the afternoon only.
So my advice is to not use the automated system if you can do the watering on your own or with a little help from your friends.
