Watering the garden automatically

A lush, green lawn, magnificent rows of beds, a multicoloured carpet of flowers – the dream of every garden lover in summer! But a professional knows that, though having a green garden paradise is a hobby and a passion, it also involves a lot of work. In particular, watering the plants and the lawn requires a lot of time and energy every day in the warm months. By using an automatic watering system, you can bypass this time-consuming process and simultaneously save valuable water. The following contains an overview of the various systems as well as how automatic watering with ground water or rain water works.

The advantages of automatic watering in the garden

The advantages of an automatic watering system in the garden can be quickly enumerated: Compared with watering using a watering can or traditional spray guns, you can save an enormous amount of time with a watering system in the garden. Moreover, this method saves water and conserves more resources than blasting the garden with tap water by hand. You can water your garden especially effectively using individually adjustable sprinklers and water timers or watering clocks. This allows lawns, plants and bushes to be watered either manually or in a targeted manner according to an individually adjustable watering schedule – even whilst you are at work or on holiday. Another advantage is that automatic watering with, for instance, rain water or ground water does not consume valuable drinking water. Rain water can be collected via a cistern or a water butt and is then connected to the automatic watering system using a booster pump and a hose system. Of course it also works the same way with ground water or water from wells, which can be distributed effectively in the garden with a garden pump.

Automatic watering: Controlled manually or by computer

If you are considering purchasing a watering system, a few questions have to be clarified first. This is not only to do with you wanting to learn how automatic watering works and what systems there are. It is also related to the quality and size of your own garden area. For example, there are questions relating to what kind of hose system is suitable and which water source you want to use, in order to provide flowerbeds, hedges and lawns with water in a targeted manner. There are also various types of water timers. It is important to know the following here: If you have answered these fundamental questions for yourself, the majority of the "work" has been done. Installation of the watering system is uncomplicated and takes just a few minutes.

How does automatic watering work?

Essentially you have three options with automatic watering. To start off with, a modern hose system that distributes water via automatically functioning sprinklers may already be sufficient. This variant is cheap and requires no laborious planning, as the mobile and individually adjustable devices can be placed in the desired area of the garden at any time if required. So you are already saving a lot of time, and can use this time to take care of your family and household or for home working. Thanks to flexible hose connection systems, several sprinklers can in some instances also be connected with each other.

But if you're no longer only talking about large patches of lawn, but rather you want to water flowerbeds and herbs, for example, in a targeted manner, an intelligent watering system is required that supplies each plant individually and in a needs-oriented manner. The micro-dripping method is used here. The water is guided to numerous drip nozzles and micro spray nozzles via a hose, so that the plants are watered not only efficiently but, above all, also in a way that conserves resources and regulates quantities. Through the combination of fine drip nozzles and micro spray nozzles, either individual plants can be watered in a targeted manner or the entire bed can be watered using various spraying patterns. When it comes to watering, there are trickle hoses additionally developed for this, which you lay in the bed or around it like a traditional hose. Installation is quick thanks to the supplied step-by-step instructions. You trim the hoses as required, using the hose distributors supplied with them to extend the system as needed. The drip nozzles and micro spray nozzles are installed on the system hose, and this is stuck in the ground in the desired place using hose spikes. Extremely practical: The micro spray nozzles can be individually adjusted via a controller.

If the garden needs to be made winter-proof, the nozzles and tap adapters of the watering system can be unscrewed in no time at all. The system should be fully dismantled and stored over the winter in a frost-proof location.

What water source is used for watering the garden?

No matter whether you want to water your plants, beds and flowers by hand or to use an automated system for watering the garden, the question remains as to the water source. The most obvious option for this is to use tap water by connecting the garden hose or the watering system to the house's tap. For some garden owners, it may, however, be worth using an alternative water source. A watering system with ground water or water from a well or automatic watering of the garden with rain water is worth considering for this.

Anyone who owns a large garden can additionally consider building a well in order to use the collected ground water or rain water to water the garden. It's true that this entails some one-off costs, but it will yield a profit from as early as a few years' time. Collecting rain water in cisterns and collection tanks and dispensing this into the watering system and eventually in the garden using pumps is also appropriate for this purpose.

Premium class: Automatic watering with water timer

Anyone who wants to have their garden watered completely automatically can rely on water timers. Even when you're on holiday or at work, you no longer need to worry that your flowers are getting too little water. You can set a watering interval on the device in advance – allowing the garden to be watered according to a schedule and fully automatically.

This works as follows. The water timer is attached to the house's water connection, as you will have seen with other watering systems. Depending on the model, you can connect one to three distributor systems to it. If you decide, for example, on a watering clock, you can only set the watering period manually. After a maximum of two hours – or earlier if required – watering stops automatically.

You can get even more independence with a water timer. This not only ensures that the garden is automatically watered once a day – or more times if required – but also measures the soil moisture via a sensor. The signal is sent to the operating unit at the water connection wirelessly, consequently starting and finishing watering depending on the function set in advance – that is the modern and efficient way of watering the garden.