GARDENING BY THE MOON
By: Dr. Robert E. Moon Harvest Horticulturist
It is summer in Texas! And with the summer heat the inevitable has happened – water rationing. The City has said all you can water is two times a week! That is what is recommended for your plants in the Harvest Irrigation Guidelines for the summer months but you need to make sure your irrigation is set for the dates that the City allows you to water.
It is very important when watering your plants and especially any new plantings, you are watering to a depth of 6 to 8 inches to encourage deep roots. On many new plantings, you may need to do some supplemental hand watering in the early morning until plants are well established. Make certain your mulch is covering the bare ground in bed areas by at least 2 inches to help conserve moisture around plantings.
To be efficient with your watering, you may want to set up multiple run times on each irrigation zone to avoid water running off your property and down the street. Turn your irrigation system on each zone, run and check when runoff starts. For spray zones, that is usually 5 to 10 minutes. On those spray zones, it might take 2 to 3 run times to wet the soil to a depth of 6 inches. You can check soil moisture depth with a screwdriver.
The drip zones in the curb median and in the beds can be run as per the irrigation guidelines for Harvest:
June
Spray Heads – 12-20 minutes
Rotor Heads – 30-45 minutes
Bubbler Heads – 5-10 minutes
Drip– 30-45 minutes
Set to run 1 or 2 times per week
July
Spray Heads – 12-20 minutes
Rotor Heads – 30-45 minutes
Bubbler Heads – 5-10 minutes
Drip – 30-45 minutes
Set to run 2 times per week
August
Spray Heads – 12-20 minutes
Rotor Heads – 30-45 minutes
Bubbler Heads – 5-10 minutes
Drip– 30-45 minutes
Set to run 1 or 2 times per week
If weeds are a problem in your lawn, you have to attack back in two ways. One, you can control them as they start to germinate by using a pre-emergent herbicide. Pre-emergent needs to be applied in mid February for spring weeds, mid May for summer weeds. If you missed these applications, or if you did not get total control, you can use a post-emergent weed killer.
The product to be selected needs to target the weeds to be controlled. Weed control can be broken down into these categories – grassy weeds such as crabgrass, dalisgrass and poa annua; broadleaf weeds such as dandelions, clover and dollarweed and nutgrass.
Grassy weeds can be controlled with any of the many brands of Weed Control for Southern Grasses, control Poa Annua with Bayer Revolver, control nutgrass with Image and broadleaf weeds with Bayer Advanced Southern Weed Killer for Lawns. These are just examples of products you can purchase. Just make sure any product is targeted for your specific weed problem and follow all label instructions when applying. Some of these products will control many kinds of weeds and reading the label will give you this information.