Desert Landscaping Needs Proper Watering

Many times the use of desert landscape is done to make the need for watering a non-issue.  They are very good at storing water. Many desert plants store water inside themselves, like cacti, for instance. While desert plants are drought tolerant by their very nature they still need some water just to thrive in our climate. 

Watering is sometimes a challenge for plant owners, especially for those who live in the desert where plants have extreme water needs. Watering questions are typical of the many inquiries we receive each year in talking with commercial property owners. In the interest of both conserving water and maintaining healthy and beautiful landscapes, let's look at this sometimes-mystery called irrigation.

It might be helpful to start by discussing how plants process water and how this process protects plants from the sun's intense heat. When temperatures are high and humidity is low, the transpiration rate for plants is high. Transpiration rate describes how fast water vapor is lost to the atmosphere through evaporation, primarily from a plant's leaves. This water loss occurs during photosynthesis when openings called stomata on leaf surfaces open and close for the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide. When the stomata are open, water vapor escapes. This evaporation has a cooling effect on leaves and is a critical part of a tree's protection from the sun's heat and light. 

Our challenge is to provide water in quantities sufficient to allow plants to "breathe," that is, to release water vapor in amounts needed to keep plant surfaces constantly within a temperature range cool enough not to suffer true dehydration.

But it's not only a function of providing adequate water. Desert-adapted plants have special features to help them handle the heat. They sometimes have thick plant surfaces or reduced surface areas or other adaptive qualities. Plants without these features have a hard time in the summer heat. Some non-desert adapted plants have large leaf surfaces that transpire at such high rates that they lose water faster than it can be replenished. In spite of having enough water in the soil, they can suffer from sunscald. 

The owners of these non-drought-tolerant species have a difficult task keeping them alive, let alone green. Survival is not only a matter of having adequate water. It's also about a plant's genetic functional ability to handle our hot environment. And that is sometimes beyond our control or even an irrigation controller.

More importantly you can let Greens Keeper Landscape Maintenance do all the work for you and take the burden off your shoulders all together.  Give us a call at 623-848-8277 and let’s talk about it.

Presented by:
Greens Keeper Landscape Maintenance, LLC
623-848-8277
http://www.commerciallandscapecare.com
greenskeeperllc@cox.net