Hoop House Farming: Wand Watering Flats

Video Transcript

"Here's another tool for keeping the hoop-house well irrigated, it's a water wand. The water wand breaks up the flow of water into a nice fine mist, allowing us to apply a large volume, without doing so much damage to the plant matter and the soil. So the job of the waterer is to discern how much abuse a given flat, or tray or shelf can withstand, because we're trying to lay down a track of volume, a lot of water without hurting the plants. So let me give you an example. Here we have a bunch of adolescence that has some resilience, but nonetheless, I don't want to smash these little basils, or these little lettuces with a powerful stream of water. So I'm going to wash over them with a sweeping motion, and just giving them the amount that I think they can use. And I go over once, and then I'll go back over a second time, which allows the water to percolate. Now I know that these plants don't need much, so I'm being very brief here, just giving them a sprinkle, pretty much for demonstration purposes. But I also know that up higher into the heat, these plants, I just know they're hurting for water, I don't even have to go up there, and I know they're going to use all that spray that I can give them. Now a professional green houser might scoff at me and say, highly abusive, not such good technique, and yet for now it works. We're able to apply the amount of water, we have very low mortality. And it's a little muddy and sloppy at times, but it does the job, and we can keep up with the extreme watering needs inside the hoop-house."