More and more curiouser

I'm trying to figure out what went wrong with Za 1 and Digitata 1, to avoid making the same mistake. Having been very careful how I watered Za 7 so far, I decided that I must have over-watered the other two, and proceeded to prove it mathematically.

At first it seemed I must be right: Digitata 1 got 4124 mL of water in 91 days, Za 1 got 3875 mL in 70 days, and Za 7 got 1575 mL in 70 days. Clearly, I was watering way too much.

Except... Za 1 and Digitata 1 were in 6" planters, and Za 7 was in a 4" planter.

Math math math math blah blah, and the moral is, Digitata 1 averaged 76 mL a month and Za 1 averaged 92 mL a month, which is normal for rainy season conditions. Za 7 has been getting 84 mL a month so far.

So my theory seems rather shaky so far. But maybe if we consider that Za 1 and Digitata 1 also got left out in the rain repeatedly, and that the soil was saturated and packed firmly before I seeded them, and that they weren't under a lamp and didn't have consistently have high temperatures... maybe it still is a question of over-watering.

Oh well. As long as Za 7 doesn't die (inshallah), I suppose it doesn't matter very much.

I like you, plants

Yesterday, I moved the aliens from under the piano to a "sunnier" spot. Of course there is still no sun and the lake is still open so there will not be sun for a long time. Anyway, I moved them to a better spot. I also measured the leader. It was 8" tall yesterday, but it was leaning towards the lack of sun. I rotated it, and now it's looking straighter and taller. They have still made no attempt to devour the dog and me. I'm hoping that by establishing a good rapport with them now, I can sic them after my enemies come summer.

Later that day, I watered... I don't remember what, but I know it's in my log.

Today, I watered Deng Xiaoping. It's more than doubled in size since it started leafing out. It's got lots of pretty, small, pale leaves. And it's still a rebel, obviously.

Sometimes I check on my hard-to-hatch seeds that never hatch. They can't win forever. There is plenty more where they came from.

Do I have a point?

Probably not. But plants are good company, in a way. They don't talk much, but they're always up to something interesting. (Except sometimes they die, but then, so do people. Plants are better company while they're alive.)

A dripline dilemma

Frankly, the way things are going, I might not need the dripline at all this year, but supposing I do, here is the thing: all plants get watered on the same schedule, though some have more drippers than others. But this doesn't reflect their needs. The Insanities need to be watered at least twice a day, because their planters can't hold all the water they need for one day, let alone for one week. Others, such as the trees, need to be watered every two weeks. In fact, none of the trees are going to be on the drip line. I'm just gonna soak them completely and maybe give them some water globes. But the problem remains: some plants need water twice a day, others need it once or twice a week. Obviously I can't go by the less frequent schedule, because an 8 L planter cannot contain 14 L of water. Therefore the drip line will run probably twice a day, and the pansies, asters, English daisies and geraniums will be displeased.

Yay verily, you can't please everyone.

For next year, if I ever get to work, I could get two driplines, put them on a T, and have one run once a week for the low-water plants, and one run twice a day for the high-water plants.

One may dream.

Things I love about gardening

I love to watch my plants drink water. Because my life is just that exciting.

Consider the following. Friday night before bed, I thought the pumpkins would need water on Saturday, but they didn't just yet. But it's a big plant and Saturday was hot, so by the time I went out to water, they had sucked their soil so dry it was cracking (and this is potting soil) and were drooping.

Gasp!

I gave them four liters of water, which is a lot considering the pot itself is only 8 L. Some of it flowed into the false bottom, but it didn't overflow. That's how dry they were, even though the day before they looked ok.

Within minutes, all the droopy leaves and flowers were upright and full of pep again.

Fascinating!

If you thought this story was boring, consider yourself lucky it took a lot less time to tell it than to live it. But I found it fascinating. Also, by evening they had sucked up most of the water in the false bottom already. They might need more tomorrow, but usually I try to avoid watering them too much on the weekend, so they'll hold a lot of water on Monday, which is their fertilizing day. More water, more fertilizer, therefore hopefully more pumpkins.

Another thing I like about plants is they're clever. Now you're thinking "no they're not, they have no brains."

Be that as it may, whenever there is a thunderstorm, most of my tall plants go limp. I don't know how they do it, because I thought rigidity depended on how much water is in the stem, but I'm starting to doubt this theory. Because they very clearly give up some rigidity whenever there is a strong blast, and straighten themselves out afterwards. Obviously this reduces breakage from the wind. What's amazing is that creatures with no brains figured it out.

It never fails...

As soon as you're done saturating the garden, it starts to rain...

How to water plants

In the last five days I've put almost 136 L of water into my garden, not counting the lawn. Now I think I should be able to water less for a while, because most of the planters are saturated. The morning glories and pumpkins are always thirsty, because their planters are too small to have any reserve, but the others can hold water for some time.

This is where I get my information on watering:

"You need to allow water to soak deep into the soil, to encourage roots to grow deeper. Shallow watering makes for shallow roots, and when the soil surface dries out, the roots do too. Soil always dries at the surface first, so plants with deep roots need watering less often... More water less often is better than less water more often."

Lois Hole, Lois Hole's Perennial Favorites, p.44.

You people don't know Lois Hole, but she was the Lieutenant-Governor of Alberta for a while and a fantastic gardener. She and her husband and sons ran one of the largest garden centres in Alberta and she wrote lots of books and newspaper columns. So if she says so, she probably knows what she's talking.

It's pretty obvious anyway. Roots go looking for water. If there is some deep in the ground, they go deep. Deep roots hold to the ground better and have access to more water. You don't even have to get told to see that it's obvious.

However, that's for in-ground gardens. Planters lose moisture from the top and bottom, and if you use clay pots, through the pot as well. So I've been phasing out the regular old planters with a hole in the bottom, and buying only the new style with a false bottom that catches the excess water without giving it a huge surface area to sit in the sun and evaporate. Only planters 0 through 3 are the old style, all the rest have false bottoms. But even so, the soil isn't necessarily saturated just because there is water in the bottom of the pot. Most of my planters reabsorb the excess water very quickly, because they use up the water that's in the soil. When they stop absorbing, they're saturated.

Thus, the maydays and geraniums are not getting watered every day, because they're not using up their water. Even though they're sitting in full sun in a heat wave, the surface of the soil is still moist, so I know they have reserves. The morning glories and pumpkins are getting watered several times a day because the planters aren't big enough to keep any reserves and they keep sucking up the water endlessly. I've never got to a point with them where they wouldn't take any more water.

The one thing that gives me pause is my lemons. Last time I repotted them, they had tiny shallow little roots, so clearly they need more water, but on the other hand, they never want any, and as a species they actually don't like a lot of water. So they rarely get any water, because they're not asking for any, and then they end up having root problems. However, as long as they're still alive, there's hope.

Optimizing the drip line

This is a screen capture from my gardening log, which is in Excel. Excel is my brain expansion pack; I can do nothing without it.

So this is why I keep such obsessive records of how much water I'm putting into the garden. You see, for those of you who don't know me yet, I work out of town, therefore the garden has to water itself. Last year I was in Yellowknife and I didn't come home very much, and the garden got watered every two or three weeks. It didn't produce very much, and I also didn't take many photos. Last year was not a good year in any aspect of my life.

This year, I'm working way the heck out of town in Saskatchewan. Specifically, in the flooded part of Saskatchewan. And I am, as always, the low man on the totem pole, so everyone goes in before me. Therefore, I'm "working" in Saskatchewan in principle, but in practice I'm at home on shortage of work, pending an end to the floods. But if it hadn't been the worst year on record for floods, I would have been home only once a month or maybe less. Therefore, I bought a drip system for the garden. And now I need to know what size drippers to use for each planter, right?

The drippers come in 2, 4, 8 or 16 L/hour, and the total drip can't exceed 200... wait, now I wonder. Was it 200 L/hour or 200 gal/hour? I've been using liters, but when I think about it, all the information I read was in gallons, so it must have been gal/hour. That makes a huge difference.

Anyway, I'll check the units later, but for now, this is how the drip line optimizer works. First I take the amount of water for each planter in the last three weeks. The oriental lily and the baobabs are excluded from the calculation because the amounts are too small.

Then, whichever planter uses the least water per day becomes the reference. Currently, and for the foreseeable future, it's the geraniums. This becomes "1" in the "drip needed" column, and everything else is expressed in units of the geranium. So you can see, the Jungle uses 13 times as much water as the geranium.

Next, I multiply it. By a multiplier. How do I find the multiplier? Simple. I need to get as close as possible to the drip line's maximum output, be it 200 liters or gallons per hour, without going over. So I multiply the "drip needed" by the multiplier and get "max drip". If the total drip exceeds the line capacity, the cell lights up red. But of course I'm constrained by the drippers, too, so everything has to be a multiple of 2 L/hour. Excel takes care of the rounding. I love Excel. So under "max drip" you can see that everything is an even number and it adds up to less than 200.

In the next column, "drip per week", we find out how many minutes per week each planter needs, based on its consumption in the last three weeks and the drippers determined in "max drip". And at the bottom I take the average of these numbers, and then a standard deviation, to see the spread, obviously. And then I express the standard deviation as a percentage of the average, so it's more legible. So now we see why I need the multiplier. The higher the multiplier, the lower the percentage is going to be, because I can create a closer approximation of each planter's optimal drip. Under the current system, you can see that the planters will mostly be getting within 10% of their requirements, as determined by their consumption in the last three weeks.

After that the columns show how many of each size dripper each planter needs, and the last column checks that I've got the right amount by lighting up in yellow. If I don't have the right amount of drip, it stays white.

So there you have it. The drip line is now optimized. Except that if I've been using the wrong units, I can almost quadruple my multiplier, which would give me much better accuracy; on the other hand I only have so many of each dripper, and there is a limit to how many I would put in each planter anyway, for obvious reasons of space. So I'm gonna have to see how many drippers I have, check the units, and then re-optimize it. That will kill some more time. Yay! I got lots of time to kill, as it happens.