What is the best practices in Water Sprinkler’s, and scheduling their watering patterns?

What is a Can test? or a Stick test?

‘Can test’ is kind of an industry standard way of measuring the amount of water being applied to an area of lawn for a given amount of time [hourly water rate]. It involves placing several tuna cans on the lawn, manually turning on the zone, then calculating run time = inches of water in can.

So if your hypothetical goal was to supply the lawn with 3″ of water per week for a Mon, Wed, Fri schedule, that’s 1″ day. Now use your cans to determine how long it takes to get 1″ in the can, say 13min. Your schedule would be Mon 13, Wed 13, Fri 13.

I find that the ‘can test’ is very valuable for finding dead areas or over watered areas of your lawn. If can1 = .75″, can2 = .75″, and can3 = .25″ it is obvious where the problem is.

The ‘stick test’ is where you push a stick into the ground, pull it out, and based on the wet marks of the stick you conclude how moist/dry the soil is at depth. I use moisture meters because for me it is critical to know what is happening below the surface [where the roots are]. It’s common that people who water too little/too often have moist soil at the surface, and bone dry soil at 6″.

If you have sandy soil and hot climate [like me] it’s common to see the surface soil bone dry [dried from the sun exposure] yet 12″ down moist, so if you used the dry surface as your judgment, then your action would be “it’s really dry – needs more water”.

Next time you remove a dead plant look at the roots. If they appear black or moldy, then you watered too often and the plant died from root rot. The soil never had the time to naturally dry out before getting more water.

These tests are far from being scientific, but they are a good starting point.