over my 10 years gardening I've made my fair share of mistakes and the category of watering mistakes is one I'm intimately familiar with so in this video we're going to go over seven of the most common watering problems and what to do about them and this video is sponsored by our friends over at hos link but more on that later first mistake is one that technically I am doing right now but I'm not super stressed about it and that is watering over the top of your plants like my little pineapple sage right here is this a bad idea or is this a good idea you hear all the time a few reasons why it's a bad idea the first one is a little bit absurd it's that in the middle of the day the water droplets on the leaves will actually Focus the sunlight and then start those leaves on fire and just through simple observation of the natural world we know that that's not the case otherwise prairies and Meadows around the country would burst into flames on a simple rainy day so that's not the reason why you should not water overhead the only thing I would avoid here is watering something like this overhead or maybe something like a squash or a tomato things that are prone to diseases where moisture increases the chance of that disease actually happening to me I think it's actually somewhat okay to water overhead if you feel like it if you're maybe a little bit lazy or you just have containers like this and there's no irrigation on them so if you want to be safe the way to water and guarantee less chance of disease is just to come in on like a container and just come in like that and go low to the ground low and slow it's a good way to get some water in but as we all do like to come out in the garden and just get jobs done if you do want to come out and do this really quickly on your containers or in your raised beds or inground beds just do it early in the morning and that gives it time to evaporate over the course of the day and that brings us to our next mistake and that mistake is picking the wrong time of day to water and there's some important caveats here as I've been growing for 12 13 years now every season I just refine my techniques a little bit more and I learned that rules sometimes are meant to be broken and so when you look at a bed like this I've got some melons right here some cantaloupes and they need water water them that's the general rule so the best time to water your plants actually has nothing to do with what time of day it is it's just when the plant needs water and we'll talk about how to know when that's the case in a couple tips but assuming you're coming out and doing your daily maintenance or you're watering that couple times a week on a schedule you'd rather water in the morning and the reason why is pretty simple is because light is coming in in the morning and over the course of the day the plant is going to use resources right it's going to transpire it's going to use up water and so you want to give it that water when it can use it the best now as you get towards that middle of the day again if the plant needs water hit it with that water but watering right in the middle of the day generally speaking not a great idea because if I come in here and I give my my bed some water and it's blazing hot noon I'm losing quite a bit of that water to evaporation especially on like maybe a windy day before it even gets used by the plants Roots then you get to the evening and I would would say I generally avoid watering in the evening but I'm not necessarily extremely against it especially if I'm watering down at the base or I have some irrigation then that water is making it directly in the soil what I definitely would not do is come out you know as the sun sets and do something like that because that's sort of setting the plant up for perhaps a bit of fungal issues or maybe some Rod or something like that so as a rule of thumb morning late morning maybe sunset time at the base of the plant are your best times watering is really about giving your plants the that Goldilocks amount of water not too much and not too little and so this mistake has to do with giving your plants too little water so if we take a look at this bed right here this is peppers and some zenas and frankly it looks awesome I'm not doing either of the mistakes I'm about to share with you but to know if you're underwatering generally speaking you're looking for some sort of Wilt in the leaves and the smaller the leaves sometimes the harder it is to detect if you are underwatering so compared to a pepper maybe take something like thyme or oregano really in those cases you're looking for that whole bushy herb structure to kind of flatten and then you know that it's really low on water but for something like Peppers you know this pepper is going to hold up pretty well to underwatering but the leaves will start to flop like this and then this is where it really is important to become a gardener learn how the plants work because if you take a look at the squash behind me in the middle of the day in summer when squash is really ripping it is going to wilt those leaves are going to fall a bit and that's sort of a natur natural protection mechanism by the plant now if those leaves don't then perk back up as temperatures cool and you move into the evening then you have a really clear signal that that squash needs water and also think about the watering needs of the plant itself so something like a squash with huge leaves and huge squash fruits it's going to need generally more water than something like this little bell pepper right here and so to me underwatering tends to happen to gardeners who are growing in bigger containers because they underestimate how much water it takes to actually hydrate this bed and our next mistake tends to happen to people who are growing in smaller containers overwatering is a problem I see most often in gardeners that have containers and those containers tend to be something that is at least somewhat solid not super permeable like maybe a fabric grow bag so take this whiskey barrel or if you're growing in plastic pots a lot of gardeners tend to overlo their plants and so every day you know you're coming out and you're drenching your container thinking that you have to do something for these plants to grow and again it gets back to knowing the plants that you're growing cuz certainly some containers and some plants would want to be watered nearly every day imagine you're growing a tomato plant in a 3 gallon container and that tomato plant's pretty big well that's a small container for that tomato plant so you're probably going to have to water it once or even twice a day but then you get to a situation like this herb bed where I have basil rosemary and Sage the only one of these that even needs a reasonable amount of water I would say is probably the basil which is right here but it's not even that big and so what I like to do to watch for overwatering is two things number one you can expect the plant counterintuitively it it will sometimes Wilt if it's overwatered and that's because the roots are water logged so they don't have the ability to get any oxygen and sort of work as they are intended to work with a mixture of taking up nutrients oxygen and water cuz there's just water kind of sucked right around those roots so all look at that and then I'll also do the finger test and this works for under and overwatering it's a very classic technique you just come in and you bring your finger in and you move it aside and you just see when you hit drier soil so if you don't hit drier soil for four or 5 in really good chance you don't need to water if you start hitting dry soil 5 6 7 in deep probably time to water you're underwatering those plants and so it really is that Goldilocks zone knowing the plants knowing the container and knowing your own habits next mistake you might be making is is just using the wrong tool for the job back in the early days I was watering this whole thing with a watering can it was arduous it was painful now we've put in irrigation and I have a hose that I can extend out to every single bed if it needs to be spot treated with any extra water in case I'm underwatering and the best part about this is it retracts which brings us to the sponsor of today's video our friends over at hos link this was my Saving Grace when I first moved in here almost 4 years ago I put it right here I put a garden setup right here here and I could quickly extend this hose out and in to every single bed before I had irrigation and it replaced the watering can that I was refilling actually on the side of my house so if you think about how I want to spend time in the garden I do want to water my plants of course but I don't want to walk back and forth into the backyard to fill up a watering can and walk out here over and over and over again so just putting this right here 82 ft retractable reel made my life way easier and then I started playing around with some of the extra access they have the thing I love so much about the system is the quick release is Far and Away one of the easiest ones that I've ever used so it's a simple twist off and then for me the long handled one is great because I'm tall and we just mentioned better to water at the base of plants if you can so in my herb bed I don't have to kind of Bend all the way in I can just take the long handle and come right down at the base and put a nice kind of like breaker stream of water I mean that's a beautiful little stream I'm just come in like that hit it come in over here and hit it right at the base and I've watered my containers really easily and then they have something that I'm starting to experiment with I've been experimenting lately with some beneficial inoculant so this is not a pesticide herbicide or fungicide it is actually a light fertilizer with a lot of beneficial life in it and I'm testing it on my squash to see if I don't have a problem with powdering mildew if I spray so with this again with the Quick Connect I can just come on and off boom twist the nozzle to the level of dilution that I want give it a nice spray and this would be one of the few cases where I would water on top of the plants cuz I'm trying to apply a treatment to their surface so the thing I love about hosing is not only is their retractable reel Far and Away the most durable there are a lot on the market these ones last the longest so your money is actually well spent but the Quick Connect system and then all the different implements they have make it easy to water no matter what you're trying to water I just showed you the surface they have oscillators deep root Waters and so much more more so we love hos link here at Epic gardening if you want to check them out the link is in the description and on to the next mistake a really big mistake you are probably making especially if you're a beginner grower is watering every plant the same kind of like a blanket watering strategy for your whole garden so take a look at this plant right here these are my Vining tomato plants this one's actually almost 6 feet tall I'm 6'4 so it's pretty tall up here this is far along in its life not only do tomatoes need more water than say an herb garden with sage and Thyme and oregano but a mature large tomato plant needs even more water than that cuz there's way more leaves to support and there's a lot of Juicy Tomatoes hanging down below so each plant requires its own watering and over the course of that plant's life it needs to be watered a little bit differently so as this tomato matures into the summer it's going to be hotter which means water's going to evaporate from the soil quicker and the plant will probably need to use more water and it's bigger so the watering needs of this tomato plant over the course of the Season might double or triple compared to that early transplant that you set out and then you have something like my pepper patch over here which has a completely different strategy because the plants are a lot shorter they can hold on to water or touch better and they can tolerate a little bit more heat so it's really about understanding the plants that you want to grow and what those plants need as far as their watering goes and speaking of those Peppers this mistake is a garden planning mistake and you can avoid it by just thinking a little bit more about what you're putting into what spots of the garden so this is my pepper patch and over the season this is slowly transitioned to be mostly Peppers now there are some flowers sprinkled here and there and most of these flowers have similar watering needs and even light needs as the peppers do so I know that if it's on irrigation or if I'm coming in with a hose and watering I don't have to give this one a little bit more this one a little bit less an example of doing this wrong would be to say plant maybe something that loves water like a big pumpkin patch next to something that really hates being watered that frequently so if you were to put like a big pumpkin right next to some drought tolerant herbs or flowers they might not have a great time so think about that think about the design of your garden it's not just watering it's lighting conditions it's the different types of plants that go well together and speaking of there is some science to the way that plants can be combined so check this video out for our guide on companion planting that is science-based and thanks to hoselink for sponsoring the video we are huge fans of them here at Epic gardening good luck in the garden and keep on growing