Irrigation Day

Great Blue Heron flying low on Devils Lake

Irrigation is especially important for absentee owners, people with large or spread out properties, those with new plantings, new yards and people who want to maintain the highest standards for their property and investment. If you are lucky enough to own a piece of dirt and you want to keep it beautiful you can not always rely on mother nature. If we get an inch of rain a week in NE IN that is adequate to maintain most everything that is green. Ideally if that rain were gentle and the ground soaked it up slowly, say 1/2 inch in the early morning on one day and another 1/2 inch three days later you would only have to be concerned about watering your container gardens.


But with the dog days of August and the unpredictability of spring and fall rains an irrigation system with a rain sensor will give you peace of mind and maximize the performance of all your plant material. The rain sensor turns off your irrigation system when nature turns on hers. Of course having water available with the flick of a remote also means you have a insurance policy in times of draught which occurs historically about every six years in my neck of the woods.



Installation of irrigation often involves boring underground, trenching or pulling pipe, lots of hand digging and the removal of glacial till found in the soils around the lakes in Steuben county. Working closely with a limited number of irrigation installers means I am able to control the timing, scheduling and fine tuning of many of the systems our customers have installed. Communication with the installers results are the plants we just put in or the yard we have installed has water immediately available.




There is a lot of controversy regarding the use of water for lawns and gardens. June/July Reader's Digest features an article, Greener Grass which puts forth some sobering statistics regarding our water consumption. The use of potable water, cisterns, rain barrels and rain gardens is gaining popularity although I do not see this as a 100% solution I think many of these systems could augment underground irrigation. I sure wish I could have captured the excessive rain we have experienced this May.