Watering insanity

[dbarron]

Sometimes, I feel like I get too carried away with the plant acquisition, about every time I need to water most of 120 plants.

If I didn't live in slug central (which loves to eat plump PBs), I'd be taking things outside where I could hit with the hose.

Haah, just had to grumble a bit...sometimes I enjoy watering...sometimes it's this colossal chore that takes about half a day.

[Leafmite]

I water quite a bit, too. I have most of my orchids in lava rock and some are itty-bitty seedlings with hardly any root and no storage so they need daily watering and the rest need watered every other day or third day. Some of the other plants are in Community pots and they need watered every day or every other day.

I got hit by slugs this past summer. We had so much rain! I have never really had a problem with them before so it was quite maddening. Between the aquatic snails in my pond, bush snails a few years ago and the slugs last summer....grrr.

I had to reduce my orchid/plant collection as it was becoming more of a chore than fun. It is much better, now. If I buy a plant/orchid and it does not thrill me, I find another home for it (relatives, neighbors and the orchid society).

[estación seca]

Put a band of copper around each leg of an outdoor bench. Snails and slugs will not crawl over it.

[Dimples]

If you do use copper bands, check them occasionally to make sure they haven’t oxidized or gotten dirty enough to let the snails/slugs crawl over unharmed. Arid areas can go years before that happens. It happens faster in humid or wet places.

A couple annual applications of Sluggo, or Sluggo Plus if you have earwig problems, really helps cut down on the population and is wildlife/human/pet safe.

[Leafmite]

I set the pots on the edge of the porch during the summer...no bench. I bought Sluggo-plus and, this year, will start using that as soon as I put the plants outside.

[tmoney]

we r right there with you. which is why we started to experiment with sphagnum, just to cut down the water use/time. we have over 200 orchids alone, and using the soaking method for those takes soooo much time.

certainly making it a weekend morning habit has helped to make sure its gets done regularly. but with the method we developed, we have to move all the plants every week...which is also not ideal! meh, i guess if we want all these plants we gotta keep em happy!!!! have fun with your watering, and use it as a zen sort of practice i suppose

[Ray]

I understand that peoples’ schedules dictate a lot of our actions, but trying to water less is going in the wrong direction.

Once upon a time, someone here pushed the fact that water is the driving force for growth. I don’t remember who, but they were right.

Naoki Takabayashi, an agriculture professor at U of Alaska Anchorage shared the carbon-fixation chemical reactions calculation that showed that in order to add one pound of mass, any plant must consume and process about 200 pounds of water, while only needing about 5 grams of NPK.

Then, if you take into account transpiration losses accounting for about 98% of the absorbed water, that would mean that to gain a pound, the plant must take in about 10000 pounds - 5 tons! of water.

While I’ve never seen any definitive evidence of it, with all of the water conservation strategies orchids have evolved, I suspect the transpiration losses are less than that in terrestrial plants, but the point is still there - water, water, water.

[dbarron]

Indeed Ray, for it's only with water translocation that dissolved minerals can move into the plant and be utilized.
I don't regret watering (well not most of the time).

It alarms me if a plant doesn't need watering at least once a week...because it's surely overpotted or mostly dead.

[Dimples]

Originally Posted by Leafmite

I set the pots on the edge of the porch during the summer...no bench. I bought Sluggo-plus and, this year, will start using that as soon as I put the plants outside.

If you have a large population of target pests, make the first application about a month (at least a couple weeks) before you plan on putting plants outside. The critters need to find and eat the bait, so it takes a little time to start working.

[tmoney]

i think for us it is not necessarily about watering less, it is being more efficient with both water and time. filling cachepots and soaking for 15 minutes, while it has been effective over the last couple years, it certainly is not scalable in efficiency!!