What is the best way to water your vegetables in the garden?
There are many ways, like…
1. Setting up an automatic watering system attached to your outside spigot.
2. Having a rain barrel or catch system to supply you with most of the water you need if you are in an area with a good amount of rainfall.
3. Using a good ol’ watering can.
But before you even decide on that, you should consider utilizing a modified version of Hugelkultur.
Hugelkultur (a German word) means “mound culture” or “hill culture”.
From the Farmer’s Almanac (https://www.almanac.com/what-hugelkultur-ultimate-raised-bed):
“Hügelkultur is a centuries-old, traditional way of building a garden bed from rotten logs and plant debris. These mound shapes are created by marking out an area for a raised bed, clearing the land, and then heaping up woody material (that’s ideally already partially rotted) topped with compost and soil.”
You can use something like this in raised beds too.
I use a modified version, with small logs and some branches at the bottom of a raised bed, then some leaves on top of that. Then fill the rest of the bed with good soil.
This technique does a lot of things.
Mainly it provides nutrients to your plants over the long haul as the material breaks down over a number of years and improves the soil.
Mainly it provides nutrients to your plants over the long haul as the material breaks down over a number of years and improves the soil.
AND…It’s a great way to help you with watering your plants.
How?
The logs and sticks that are on the bottom of the raised bed will hold moisture from the water you give it or from the rain that drenches the bed after a storm.
So it’s possible that you might need to do a lot less watering overall.
In a normal raised bed, most of the water that’s put into it will disappear quicker especially in hot stretches during the summer when vegetables drink up a lot and the sun evaporates it from the surface.
And for any extra water, gravity will take care of whatever’s not used by your plants.
Since I went to this modified hugelkultur technique, there were times last summer during a couple weeks without rain that I needed to do less manual watering than I normally would have to. This does make a difference.
Of course it depends on the size and amount of logs and sticks you put it and how far down they are.
I like to line the whole bottom of the bed area with the logs and then put the sticks over that before topping it with leaves.
Just remember a lot of summer vegetables have roots that extend down from 18″ to 24″, so you don’t want to stuff the logs and sticks so high that it will affect the growth of your plants.
—–
If you’d like help with setting up something like this, just let me know.
Bill
Phone/Text: 410-330-8014
[The pics are a couple of raised beds I’ve assembled for others using a modified version of hugelkultur.]
If you’d help setting up a garden, just call or text 410-330-8014 or email info@GardensAndGrowRooms.com
