how often and for how long do you water your lawn and plants?

[bookworm2768]

and you are of course aware that a house in many parts of DFW needs to be watered too if you are to avoid major foundation damage?? I had pipe dreams of ripping out the lawn and planting a xeric landscape until I realized that I needed to water the house!!
As to watering, our yard and foundation seems to do just fine with 10 min per zone every second day. I have stopped watering the strip next to the curb though and the grass there is ok. I increase frequency or time of watering if we are going through a very hot or dry spell. My focus is more on keeping the house stable and the yard gets watered as an added benefit.
It took me a couple of summers to figure out how much was right for our home. It's frustrating and costly experience if it impacts your foundation.

[Eric Fred Norris]

have been watering 10 min each zone every other day. didnt mention it earlier but three of the zones are for just grass, the other three are for plants, bushes, flower beds, etc.

should i water more for the heavily planted areas or keep it at 10 minutes each. thx.

[wagsone]

If your heads that aren't working are pop ups (not the rotary ones) they are fairly easy to fix yourself. Lowes and Home Depot both carry parts for Rain Bird systems. Our landscapers love to pop them with mowers so we replace a few during the season, especially later in the season when they have a build up of dirt in the riser tubes and they don't quite retract all the way. Crazy as it sounds, our sprinkler company told us to spray the actually risers with WD40 every now and then...

[lh_newbie]

I personally think every other day for 10 mins/zone is a bit much - our sprinkler guy says to watch your sprinklers, when you see a bunch of runoff, you should stop them or you're just watering the street/sidewalks. We run ours for 7 minutes per zone on Monday, Wed and Fri, starting at 7am at this time of year. Once we get into the constant 90's and 100's, I will change that to 6 minutes/zone on the same days, but run it twice -- once at 4am, once at 7am. That way it has a couple hours to absorb the water, then gets hit again to ensure a deeper watering.

Brian