Watering Tips

Watering should be done during early morning hours

Most lawns will respond better to early morning watering. Two major
reasons are (1) Watering at night induces fungus to grow on the grass plants
causing injury or death to the plants. Diseases such as summer patch, dollar
spot, brown patch are encouraged by moisture on the leaves for prolonged
periods of time. If you water at night for example, the grass plant will stay
wet all through the night making the problem worse. If you water during
early morning, the plant has a chance to dry off by early morning reducing
the problem. Fungus can wipe out an entire lawn in under a week so be
careful!

Watering should be done on infrequent, but deep watering cycles

Depending on the type of grass and time of year, you will need to put down
aprox. 1" at a time during watering. An ideal way to determine how much
water has been put down is to use a "catch can test". This amounts to no
more than placing a coffee can or rain gauge in the path of your sprinkler
and measuring how much water it catches in an hour, or 30 minutes. This
will tell you your sprinkler or system's "precipitation rate". This will be very
important in determining how long to water. If watering manually, you will
have to time your water cycles to know when to move your sprinkler. An
automatic system will turn the water off on each section of the lawn after a
pre-determined amount of water has been applied. Then the system will
turn on the next section and off as described before, until the entire lawn has
been watered. These systems are great for people who are trying to have a
top notch lawn.