Buckle up for yet another soapbox lecture that simply can’t be left unsaid any longer. Unless you’re sixty-five years old or older, and in your bathrobe, and using nothing but a garden hose, it’s totally inappropriate to water your lawn at the hottest peak of the day. And yet, I see this inexplicably happening all the time.
I’m a walker. I regularly find myself walking home around five o’clock in the afternoon. Lately, that’s meant I’m walking home in the one-hundred-degree heat. (Don’t cry for me, I live in Idaho. It’s a dry heat.) On a daily basis, I saunter past lawns with programmed irrigation systems set to spritz and sprinkle during peak heat. It’s as if the owners and regulators of these irrigation systems have reconciled this outrageous behavior based on when they themselves find their thirst most voracious.
Understandably, we humans crave McDonald’s iced tea (or perhaps Sonic’s strawberry-pulp iced tea) most intensely during the peak heat of the day. So surely, that’s when our lawns are the thirstiest too! This is a natural assumption, and at its core not incorrect. The breakdown occurs between this correct heat-thirst correlation and understanding how grass drinks tea water. You see, just like people don’t satisfy their thirst via iced-tea-showers (this would simply leave you sticky and unsatiated), plants also don’t satisfy their requirements for hydration via spritz and sprinkle. Your grass has to drink the water, same as you have to drink the iced tea. While humans use our mouths to drink, grass uses its root system to drink.
I’ll pause here to allow the utter shock of this last statement to settle. I apologize that there are apparently no longer any institutions left in our society to reliably teach this information to the general populous. Thus, you had to learn this vital bit of information from some yack-jawed humorist who refers to himself as the Redneck Granola. I know. It’s insulting. It’s disorienting. It’s the reality we live in.
Okay, assuming you’ve had time to sit down and sip an Arnold Palmer, I’ll continue.
I see that hand. You’re thinking to yourself,
“Good God, man! If the goal is to convey life-giving water to my lawn’s root system during peak heat hours, and the best method to deliver said water is NOT a direct aerial-assault via programmed irrigation system, how in God’s name do I rescue my precious lawn from the scorching death-grip of the sun’s rays?!”
Don’t fret. Even though the correct solution is to rip out your impractical lawn and replace it with anything more reasonable than grass, that’s not what I’m going to tell you. The best strategy is still to utilize your programmable irrigation system. The only change you need to make is to spin back the timer by twelve hours. Simply switch the “pm” on your controls to “am,” and you’re done. Well, some of you will be done.
For the rest of you, why in the name of all things holy are you watering your lawn for fifteen minutes a day every day of the week!? Have you started drinking hammerhead-worm smoothies and gone insane? Sorry, forgive my outburst. Ehem, what I meant to say is if you are watering your lawn every day of the week, you must be completely and inexcusably out of your mind! Are you trying to terraform your lawn into some sort of alien landscape where it rains everyday but only for fifteen minutes during the hottest part of the day! I’m losing my mind here!
Again, I apologize. I don’t know what got into me. Remember, the goal is to allow your lawn’s root system to slurp up the water it needs whenever it needs it. Unless you want your lawn’s root system to remain 1/4 inch beneath the surface thereby requiring it to suckle at your irrigation system’s teat constantly for its survival, you need to water your lawn for longer than fifteen minutes at a time. By increasing your programmed spritzing sessions to something more like forty-five minutes at a time, you can reduce the number of waterings a week to two or three (depending on how hot your environment is, how much direct sun your grass gets, and how water thirsty your totally-impractical-grass species is. I’m looking at you Kentucky Bluegrass).
Okay, so now you’re watering your lawn at 5:00am for forty-five minutes a session twice a week. Congratulations. This means your grass will grow a healthy root system deep enough to survive the harsh peak heat of the day and still be able to drink water from the soil whenever it needs it! (Instead of being sun-scorched by the heat-polarizing water droplets that manage to not evaporate before essentially setting your lawn’s hair on fire.)
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