Whoopsie Daisy Watering!

Gabe and Rebecca introduce a learn-from-our-mistakes segment inspired by Hugh Grant in Notting Hill: whoopsie daisy! In this case the topic is: don't forgot to water your damn plants! But is watering that simple? How much water do plants really need? And what does it mean "water until established"? They get into all that and so much more.

Transcript

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Welcome to leafing out a podcast about gardening. I'm Rebecca. And I'm gay. We are not experts. We are amateur gardeners sharing what we learn as we learn it on our gardening journey. We're also amateur podcasters, so I'm really happy that you've actually stuck around because I think the last episode we did was like nine months ago. Six months ago. Much too. Long. Very long. We're going to try to be back. It's almost like we have two toddlers, not one, but two toddlers. We're less sleep deprived now, though. Yeah, we should be able to figure out the words that we're trying to say. I mean, I mow the lawn this morning. That's a. Big deal. People can listen to us on, like, 1.5 instead of two X as we get as our children get older. Yeah, the. Older. Children are the faster you speak. That's right. Yeah. All right. Today we're talking about. I think we're gonna talk about some mistakes that we've made recently that you might be able to learn from. Yeah, a little. Do as we say, not as we do. Action. Yeah. And we're going to talk about watering. Watering. Everyone's favorite part of gardening. Now I'm being sarcastic. Not my favorite part of gardening. But it is like a it's it's like, I don't know, salting your food or it's like this very foundational thing that is also, like, really complicated and not that straightforward. Not all that weirdly complicated. A little bit weirdly complicated. So we have some tips and tricks that we've picked up that we're going to share with you. It's a new segment that we're calling Whoopsie Daisy. So when you say nothing. Yes, you did. No, I didn't. You said, oops, Daisy's. No onesies for the Daisy's, do they? I mean, honestly, there. Is no unless because no one has said whoopsie Daisy's for, what, 50 years? And even then it was just little girls with blond ringlets. Exactly. Right. So here we go again. Oh, oh. Oh. That clip is none other than Hugh Grant in Notting Hill for those who haven't seen Notting Hill. There is this on the podcast. Just go. It's true. What will you. Do? What do you do in your life? Get out of here. Be more important. Go out and watching Notting Hill. One of the best rom coms ever made. Notting Hill. You'll be quoting it for the rest of your life. It'll be really obnoxious like we are. Oh, that's. Quite good. Then. Oh, well, that's quite good. I mean, it's just. It's in the lexicon in this household. What's it Easy is a segment where we talk about a mistake that we have made recently. So the mistake that we made recently is which one? So August in Rhode Island as a lot of the other country was crazy hot. We also have a concrete skirt like this, sort of like short little patio wi thing on the back of our house that just reflects light is like a mirror. It's like just blistering hot. Even a lot of our full sun plants don't do very well there. It's like a pizza stone and. It's like it needs a stone. Exact. It gets real. It like, bakes in the sun. Toasty in this. Heat. And I was like, Oh, it's hot and water. The garden, you know, when I think of it like probably a few times a week or something, and that was not nearly enough. So gardening is all about observation. And I was distracted and not really paying close attention to the water needs of these plants. And then, you know, we'd go out of town for a weekend or like just an overnight or something, and maybe I hadn't water in the day or two before. And there was one time in particular we went out of town for just like two days. We didn't really think about it like, oh, whatever. And I came back and several of the plants were like desiccated, like these little corpses. I was like, Oh, I'm sorry, you know? Oh, I'm so sorry. Please don't die. So, yeah, observation. Try to just go out and look your plants. If I've been looking at my plants a little more carefully, I would have noticed in the days leading up to our trip out of town that they were, in fact, starting to get a little wealthy. And plants are pretty communicative. They do a lot of different things to conserve water before damage actually starts to happen. So as their leaves start to droop little bit, sometimes if they have flowers, those will close a little bit. You'll see these signs that say to you, you know, hey, this plant is is a little dry. And one thing to pay attention to in particular, when you're trying to figure out if they're dry, don't look at your plant in the middle of the day because a lot of plants do when they're exposed to really intense sunlight and heat. They just do that like every day, even if they do have a lot of water. Look at your plant in like the late afternoon or evening and if it's bounced back, then it probably is doing okay if it sort of like had a little bit of a wilting look in the day and then came back in the evening, it's it's doing all right. Or first thing in the morning. Or first thing. And a lot of people water first thing in the morning. I want to be that person. I'm so not that person. But I picture being an old lady and like a fabulous sunhat going out at 630 in the morning and watering everything and it being all paradise. It's true. The never end up doing that. Thing that I'll say. There's a lot of back and forth about what kind of water. I'm not certainly like an expert on this. I will say that in the absolute heat of the summer, I like to water in the evening because then you give the plant all night long to be absorbing that water. That water's not evaporating very fast overnight. It's the sun. And the heat, obviously, is what really evaporates it. If you're going to be watering in the morning, then you really got to be out there every day looking at your plants because

so you water at 9: 5:50

00 by 1030, it could be 90 degrees. That water's evaporating. That plant that was it's shot to absorb water. And now it's sort of done drinking for the day. Let's talk about some more general stuff with water. Yeah, because if you like, we were like three years ago or four years ago are just starting out with this stuff and buying a lot of plants and hoping that they do well and wondering like, how much should I be watering? Do I really have to water every day? I didn't sign up for this. This sucks. What like how lazy can I be? Give. I think you have learned a little more than I have about like exactly what things need. Yeah. So. So you'll see when you buy a new plant, it'll have on the tag what it's like sunlight needs are watering need some, some plants are water lovers that usually you would find next to a pond or something. There are wetlands, flowers and wetlands plants where they want a ton of water, a lot of ferns, like a lot of water. Liguria is something that we have right next to our birdbath because we're always refilling the birdbath and splashing it all over the stuff and it like gets the most water of almost anything in our garden. But a lot of plants have stuff on the on the tag that will say like low watering once established. What does that mean? Gabe So established is a little bit of a general term, but from what I've heard, my, my understanding is generally plants established after two years. So you get through two summers, the third summer you have an established plant and that that's where we planted our lawn. That's what they said, you know, water. Well, for the first two summers, the third summer it comes back, then it's established just meaning that there is a really robust root system that can support this plan. I am definitely like reaching a little bit here, but my understanding is that, you know, you have the sort of big roots that you see when you pull of a plant and then you have all these root hairs, these really fine little root hairs that come off of those main roots. And those are doing a lot of the water absorption and they take a while to really like grow out, like have those big solid roots coming out and then all the root hairs coming out of those larger roots. So when you're planting a plant, it just doesn't have a lot of water absorbing capability. It can't like pull in a lot of water really fast. It doesn't have roots that are going deep. So it's this kind of it's sort of top heavy in a way. It's got all of this this greenery, presumably because it looked good at the nursery or wherever you bought it. But to support that, it just has this very small root system. So you are really kind of taking very careful care of it, making sure that those that limited root system can absorb a lot of water as it balances out because all plants will want to balance their belowground growth with their aboveground growth. It's like a baby, like we have a newborn baby. It's stomach is so teeny tiny, right? And it's growing so much that you have to feed it like every couple of hours. And it's difficult. Yeah, challenging and fussy. And then once your once your kid gets old enough, they can have three meals a day and two snacks and be pretty. Good, put them in front of the TV and they're fine all day. Long. Water, water. Heavily until established. Yeah. Yeah. So what we tend to do is especially with new, new plants, make sure that you're not letting them dry out because that kind of damage is really hard for them to bounce back from if you plant something. This is why also they say plant in spring and fall. Don't plant new plants in the middle of summer because it's so hard for them to absorb enough water that they just will. Parts of the plant will die. The roots won't establish well, and it will take years for the plant to grow as much as it would in like one year if you had just planted it at a more mild time of the year when the plant could really kind of start to thrive above ground and below ground. So another thing I thought might be helpful to hear is what do you do about rainfall if it's raining off and on? You know, oftentimes I'll be like, well, it just rained like two days ago. Do we really have to water? The ground isn't wet, but I don't know, like how much it seemed like it rained a lot, but did it what do we how do we think about that. Yeah. So the rules on that I've heard a lot and this is definitely again a broad general thing is that your garden wants an inch of water per week. And obviously we're talking about gardens in climates like ours. Yes. In the northeast Cottage garden type things, woodland garden type ideas. If you're in Southern California or something. We have we have we have no information for you. Yeah. If you're doing like a zero escape like southwest cacti thing, I'm not sure how much water you need. I'm not sure if you're listening to this podcast at this point. Yeah. Okay, so go on. So the easiest thing to do is to just start out as you get a rain gauge and rain gauges just like a little, you know, the one we have has sort of like a cone, I guess an inverted cone with markings on it and you stick it on like a we have it on our on our fence. You don't want to put it on the side of a house because obviously, like if the wind is blowing the wrong direction, then none of the rain goes into the rain gauge, but it just catches the rain as it falls and gives you some sense. So it's like a little measuring cup. It's like a stick on a fence pole with that, with like one nail. It's super easy. It's just a piece of plastic and the rain falls into it and it tells you how how many inches or is it a quarter inch or was it a full inch? Yeah. And then from there, you kind of, you know, decide how much water you want to use. I found it pretty helpful, too. Also, sometimes I'll take the rain gauge, like when that we have a low water line. But every once in a while in the heat of the summer, there's a week or two when it needs a little sprinkler and I'll be like, Oh, I don't like how much water is the sprinkler giving the lawn? So I'll take the rain gauge. It has sort of a pokey and or a stick it in the dirt in the lawn. And as the sprinkler goes, I have a sense of like, Oh, all right, it takes half an hour to get, you know, half an insurance. I'll do that a couple of times a week, something like that. The other thing I'll say, it's sort of broad that I really did not understand about watering when we first started gardening. Is that you're really trying do you hear people talking about like, oh, get you want a deep soak and like, what does that mean. Yeah, you want to water your plants and give them a really deep soak. You really need to like leave the hose going and really get it so that the whole amount of the like, the height of the plant, you want to soak through that height from below. I don't. I'm explaining that in a way. No, I think. That's actually a great visualization. I was going to say it's hard to imagine because all we can see is the surface of the dirt, obviously. So like you sort of, you know, soak that and you're like, well, what else could there be? But if you think about it, in in sort of layer is like this is kind of made up. But you think about like different one inch thick layers of dirt going down to the bottom of the roots of the plants. You have to completely saturate the first inch if you want water to go down to the second image. So like imagine a stack of sponges, you're trying to get the bottom sponge wet. You need the first sponge to be so full of water that it overflows into the second sponge and then into a third, fourth, whatever. So that's both the amount of water that you need to put in. And also in terms of timing, you really don't want to just like sit there with the hose on you want to pour a bunch of water around the the roots of the plant, go water another part of the garden, come back water some more again, maybe a third time, depending on how deep the soak you want. But like if you have a new plant there, especially like a shrub or something that needs a lot of water, you want to really like try and get that water down as far as possible. You can also just stick your finger in and you can, you know, if you're not sure, you can water for a little bit and then say like, how deep is this going? And just like dig a little hole with your finger and feel like, how deep is that water going? If it's really dry, it's going to take more than you think to really get in there. It's tough if you're cleaning up like a big spill on the kitchen counter and you're using a kitchen towel. You'll remember that at first the dry kitchen towel will kind of be like moving the water around. And then once the towel starts to get damp and absorb water, that's when it absorbs all the water really well. So the soil works the same way. Once it's damp, damp soil absorbs water more easily than dry soil does. And this is kind of why when we have terrible drought like we've been in, and then you have a huge rainstorm where it drops a ton of inches of water, the earth isn't actually absorbing that water very well. So that's not like hitting the spot for your plants because it's so dry. It's like the earth is like, I can't do anything with this. I'm too dry. So what we really need in drought, that's why people say what we need is like gentle on going like on and off rain for many days in a row because that's how the ground gets saturated. So that's what you're kind of mimicking with watering. And what I do in our backyard when I water is I kind of take like a ten or 15 foot section of the flower beds at a time. And I sort of do like 10 seconds, 10 seconds, 10 seconds, 10 seconds per plant until I'm all the way down the row of that like ten foot section. And then I just start over and do it again, because once everything is a little damp or soaked a little bit, then you can go back and really know that the water is kind of getting really deep down. And the other thing I'll say is the reason why you want the water to get so deep in the soil. I know we're getting so into the weeds. This may be so boring. I don't know. But you're here. You're listening. Why not keep going? The reason why you want the water to get so deep down, especially with new plants, is because you want the plants roots. You want the plant to send its roots really far down as opposed to outward along the surface, the same as a plants above ground apart will grow towards the light. The below ground part, the roots is going to grow towards the water. So you want the roots to grow downward because that's where water is going to stay for the longest over time, once it's established, if you if your plant is growing its roots only along the surface, well, that's the first area to get dehydrated. So it's always going to be more thirsty. It's going to struggle more in the long term. This is why the whole watering thing before something is established is so important. And the one other thing well, I don't know one other thing, but another thing. Another thing. That I'll say about watering this is maybe a little this is this is watering 2.0. But we have a soaker hose run that goes all the way around our garden in the the border and also in the vegetable garden. I will take a brief detour. Vegetables need more water in general as a general rule than other parts of your garden. So if you have a vegetable garden, consider getting soaker hose. So far, hoses are amazing. We can get a lot of different kinds, but we just have the ones that are sort of porous and they just like leak water all along their length because you can just turn that on for, you know, an hour. And it's just slowly doing this drip, drip, drip that's really getting the water way down without you being out there, you know, holding the watering can or the or the hose or whatever. Again, it's imitating like an off and on little gentle sprinkle. Like what you have in spring, which is why planting in spring is a good idea. Let's talk about what other tools we use for watering. Yeah. Our dreams are. On. Our podcast. Today is sponsored by the DRAM Rain one. Just kidding. We still don't have any sponsors. We have, I think. How many listeners do we have, Gabe? I don't know how. Approximately more than more than one might guess. More than we make, yes. 30, 40. I don't know. Guys, we're so glad you're here. Yeah, we use this thing called the dram brain wand. That is not the cheapest option, but really is so effective. It's a tool that is always mentioned by, you know, professional gardeners as being their go to. And it's just basically like a really good shower head kind of thing. It creates the water, so you're getting like more flow in the right spread. Without a lot of pressure. That's the thing. You can always be tricky. You're trying to hurry along and you want to like get a ton of water, especially like into your pots or something. But then if you turn the hose up, you're like blowing the dirt out of there. Blast in your plan. Yeah. The rain does a good job of, like, a ton of water, but without that, that force. So that's watering. If you still have questions you want to address, please drop us a line. You can find the way best ways to contact us in the show notes. I think there's a bunch of ways you can always DM us on Instagram. That's a really easy way to get in touch with us. We think out pod on Instagram. We would love to hear from you and to get into our second topic, a fast one for today. I want to talk about tomatoes and what's up with my tomatoes, something that I know all tomato growers are always asking themselves. Probably we have tried to grow a variety of tomatoes and the larger ones are always so tricky for us. There's so many issues that can come up, but we decided to just do cherry tomatoes because it's so nice and easy and so there aren't a lot of issues. But something happened recently that I bet most people growing tomatoes and everybody kind of comes upon this issue at some point in the season, which is when your tomatoes burst on the vine. There's crack, crack there. There's a seam that cracks open. You can see the inside of the tomato. It obviously needs to be picked right away. And you might be wondering what happened, what made this happen? Too much water. Too much water. That's what our uneven watering is. Actually a more accurate way to say that there was an amount of water that the plant was used to, and then it got a lot more than that amount and that's what caused the fruit to burst. Yeah. So we recently had, we've been in the middle of crazy drought here and then we had a wild storm where Providence and the next town over got like ten and 11 inches of rain in, under, under 24, maybe even under 12 hours. It was bad, bad, bad, bad flooding. And of course, I went out the next morning and all of our cherry tomatoes were bursting open unless they were really, really not ripe yet. So I thought I would just share some some suggestions of what to do with tomatoes that have done that, because they're not the most beautiful for putting in, you know, a salad or whatever. But what I did is I picked them all and I chopped them all and used them, mix them with some raw garlic and olive oil and a bunch of salt. And I just left them in a bowl for a couple of hours. And the garlic sort of flavored everything, all of the juice of the tomatoes, kind of the tomatoes. I gave up all their liquid because of the salt. And then I used that as like a fresh tomato pasta sauce with pappardelle pasta. And it was so good. It's delicious. So that's one idea. Panzanella is also always great with tomatoes that are a little funny if you have like some tomatoes that are overripe and kind of soft. Panzanella is such a good, such a good option for that. And you can always throw them on a sandwich with mayonnaise and salt. And that is probably the best thing to do if you have big tomatoes. Yeah, but with our cherries that's those are the two things that we like to do the most. Yeah, I think we did it. I think that's pretty good. So thank you so much for listening today. If you have a question that you want answered on the podcast, email us or send us a voice memo at leafing out pod at gmail.com. Like I said, you can always DM us on Instagram. We're leafing out pod over there. Happy gardening. And the other oh, the other thing you can do. For review us on Apple Podcasts that people find the show. That really helps us a lot, helps other people find the podcast. We really appreciate it. Happy gardening. See you out there.