Quotes: Watering

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When watering, the amount should remain consistent -- enough to wet the entire soil mass in the pot. However, change the frequency of watering with plant size and light. A plant with more leaves uses water more quickly than one cut back or few-leaved. A plant uses water more quickly on sunny dry days than during dim, cool times. 
 

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Overwatering kills more house plants than under watering.

- Roberta M Coughlin -
see What's Coming Up #77

 When the well's dry
we know the worth of Water.

- Benjamin Franklin, in Poor Richard's Almanack -
see What's Coming Up #93

Water is critical as plants start growing. Do check whether lawn, trees and shrubs need water even before the sprinkler system is turned on. Don't just feel the surface. Dig down about eight inches to check if the soil is dry. It's surprising how dry it can be down deeper where the roots are, even when the surface is damp.

- Mary Wilson, Michigan State University Extension -
see What's Coming Up #137

Below, left: Plump leaves mean this jade (Crassula) does not need water. Below, right: Leafless, here, it's nonetheless at a critical water-use state while sprouting after cut-back. (See Jade cold cut back.) It needs its regular amount of water -- one bottle full wets all the soil in this pot and oozes just a little out the drain hole -- but will need replenishment less often while it has few, small leaves. Low light cuts the need, too. We might not give it another bottle of water for 4 or 5 weeks during winter's dim, short days.

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 You can use ice cubes set on the soil to water plants, indoors and out. It's slow release moisture for plants that don't like to dry down.

- Marge Alpern  -
see What's Coming Up #161

  ...there is nothing more exasperating than a hose that just isn't long enough. 

HoseWrestlN5610s.jpg - Cecil Roberts -

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HoseExpndg9913s.jpg Funny thing about a hose: Too short, just right or too long, at any length it puts up a fight when we try to manage it. Above, left: Shelley Welch laughs while hose wrestling.
Above, right: When we look at those incredible expanding hoses we think this must be what intestines look like. (A great idea and fun to watch work, not one of the several we've seen or used have lasted long before springing leaks.)


...set the basketball on the kitchen table. Open a cupboard, get out a bottle of sesame seeds, and place a single seed beside the basketball. If you were to reduce the Earth to the size of a basketball, all the fresh surface water on the planet -- all those rivers and lakes and ponds and streams -- would fit inside that one tiny sesame seed. Add a second sesame seed; now you have all the usable underground water as well. Is fresh water a scarce resource?

- William Ashworth, The Economy of Nature, 1995 -

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Don't know why you feel compelled to do a thing a certain way? Bet you saw someone doing it just that way when you were two.

 - Janet -

We wonder what examples we are setting for kids today, who will almost certainly see more water shortages than we've ever imagined. Do we have enough reverence for a pond? Do we notice -- we didn't! -- the irrigation leak that existed for so many years that it eroded the concrete walk?

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