Hi, I’m Ed Bruske. We’re talking about how you can start your own vegetable garden and grow food right outside your own home. I’m doing a little watering here with my watering wand and a few things you need to know about watering, the first is don’t use too much. You don’t want to use more water than your plants actually need there are number of reasons for that.

First and foremost is water is becoming a precious resource we don’t want to waste any of it anything that maybe on the ground is liable to wash into your local watershed and become pollution so you we want to give the plants only as much water as they need.

And there are a number of ways to do that there’s probably and ideal watering system for a vegetable garden is called drip irrigation. And that’s a watering system that’s sort of planted into your garden with pipes that only let out a drip, drip, drip of water and that sinks down deep into the soil which forces the plants to grow deep roots.

We want the plants to grow deep roots down into the soil rather than spreading thin roots over the surface. And one of the issues that most gardeners, beginning gardeners have is that they water too often and too lightly. And what that does is it signals to the plant that the water to be had is really at the surface so rather than developing big deep healthy root systems, they develop a flimsy system of roots right at the surface. We want them to go down deep, so we want the water to saturate deep into the ground.

So drip irrigation is a very good way to get the water saturated deep into the soil and force those roots deep. Another way is using soaker hose and this hose, thiis type of hose is made out of usually out of recycled tires and what it does is when you turn it on it kind of oozes out of the hose.

So this one be so much a permanent fixture in your garden, usually it’s a looped through the planting areas and sort of semi buried in there so that when you turn it on and you can do that with the—you can put it on a timer as well. it gives you a very slow oozing of water, again that goes deep into the soil and feed the roots down there.

Our garden is still kind of temporary. We have long term landscaping plans here, these beds that I built aren’t going to be here forever so we haven’t put in a permanent kind of irrigation system and I used the watering wand mainly to water in new plants and to water in individual spots. And what you want to do is not water the plant so much as to water the soil.

Well getting the plants wet in a bright sun actually can damage them, the light being magnified through the drops on the leaves can hurt them. So we don’t like to do this too much in the bright sun and when you do water, you want to do it in the morning as early as possible if you can. In that way it gives the water time to evaporate during the day. One of the biggest dangers to plants is fungi and of course they like that moist environment.

And will attack of the plants if they’re left moist over night. Finally what we do to get a really deep soaking of the garden beds is put the hose on the sprinkler and do that. it’s not optimum by any means we’d rather have the drip irrigation but sometimes you really need to that because it gets very hot and dry here in Washington in the summer. Next I’m going to show you how to build fertility in your garden soil mainly by using compost.