Simple Irrigation Strategies for a Thriving Home Garden

In this episode of The Evergreen Thumb, guest Austin Little, a Teaching Professor of Horticulture at Washington State University, joins host Erin Hoover to chat about irrigation strategies to keep home gardens thriving while conserving water. He discusses how using a diverse array of plants makes a garden more resilient, especially in drought-prone areas. Austin explains how the principles of waterwise gardening can be applied to home gardens. He also highlights the key challenges gardeners face when watering, including the types of plants and landscape systems in place, which can impact efficient watering practices.

• Xeriscaping: planning and executing a waterwise landscape
• Drip Irrigation for the Yard and Garden
• SpokaneScape Lawn Replacement Program
• The Waterwise Garden
• Using Arborist Wood Chips as a Landscape Mulch (Home Garden Series)
• Drought Advisory: Water Conservation in Gardens and Landscapes
• Unveiling the Secrets of Successful Rain Gardens – Episode 015
• Dry To Dazzling: Beautiful Xeriscape Gardens with Elaine Jamerson – Episode 13

[00:00:00] Erin Hoover: Welcome to The Evergreen Thumb, your go-to podcast for up-to-date research-based horticulture and environmental stewardship knowledge to help you grow and manage your garden. Produced by Washington State University Extension Master Gardener Volunteers and brought to you by the Master Gardener Foundation of Washington State.

[00:00:16] I’m your host, Erin Hoover, a WSU Extension Master Gardener since 2015 and a certified permaculture designer and modern homesteader.

WSU Master Gardener volunteers are university-trained community educators who have been cultivating plants, people, and communities since 1973. Are you ready to grow? Let’s dig into today’s episode.

Guest Introduction

Our guest today, Austin Little, is the Teaching Professor of Horticulture at Washington State University. Previously, he was the Green Infrastructure Maintenance Manager for the city of Denver, and before that, he was a University of Illinois Extension Horticulture Educator. He’s a graduate of Southern Illinois University Carbondale with an MS degree, focusing on Landscape Horticulture and Urban Agriculture.

He has been closely engaged with Horticultural Science, Green Infrastructure, Ecological Landscaping, and Master Gardeners over the past two decades through research, teaching, and professional work. Austin is here today to talk to us about efficient irrigation in the garden.

Austin, thanks for joining me today.

Welcome to the show.

[00:01:24] Austin Little: Well, thank you for having me, Erin. Happy to be here.

The Role of Water Availability and Water Conservation in Resilient Landscapes

[00:01:29] Erin Hoover: Okay, so today we’re going to talk a bit about water and landscaping and resilient landscapes. So how does water availability and water conservation play a role in building a resilient landscape?

[00:01:47] Austin Little: So that’s a great question, and resiliency is what we want to try to develop, in our landscapes.

[00:02:00] Uh, we want our landscapes to be sustainable. In sustainability, part of that is resilience. I think, uh, we, we want our landscapes to, uh thrive, and to survive.

So, I like the word resilience. Uh, but the word that it brings to my mind is durability. Um, so durability or a tough landscape. I’m a fan of tough landscapes that are low maintenance and, and, and I think that that low maintenance component really is crucial to that resiliency.

And so, resiliency, how can we do that?

We can do that through promoting a diverse landscape with a wide variety of plants and, and a lot of times that’s going to look like plants that are indigenous to a climate or, or a region. So, trying to utilize a lot of natives that are well adapted to the extremes of the local climatic conditions. So we want something that will do well in the nice times of the year, but what’s important for the plants, for their resiliency is that uh, tolerance and adaptability to the extremes.

[00:03:00] Uh, and that’s where native plants are going to perform really well in those roles. It doesn’t always have to be native plants. Uh, we, you know, we, we can have diversity, we can have plants from other areas, uh, or uh, regions, but primarily native plants are going to perform pretty well, especially when it comes to water conservation and using water, uh, in a, uh, efficient way in our landscapes.

Challenges that Gardeners Face When it Comes to Efficient Watering

[00:03:43] Erin Hoover: Okay, so what are some of the key challenges that gardeners face when it comes to efficient watering?

[00:03:49] Austin Little: Key challenges? So there, there’s a number of challenges when we’re trying to be more waterwise, and, and maybe we’ll talk about waterwise landscape design. So yeah, the challenges to efficiency are going to be what? What is our landscape?

How, you know, what, what is our landscape made of? What plants are in our landscape? What types of landscape systems do we have? Do we have, uh, turf? Do we have a lot of turf? If that’s the case, that is going to be a higher demand for water and, uh, be less efficient. So, a grass turf, that’s usually going to be the most, uh, resource intensive landscape that there is, uh, especially for water, especially in a climate that uh, tends to have drought, especially in the west.

So yeah, we’re in an area where we, uh, are drought-prone, right? We’re, we’re prone to drought. So yeah, the challenges are what plants are we using in the landscape? What kind of systems are we using to water our landscape?

How are we going about watering? So, I guess, yeah, big challenge is what is our landscape built out of? What, what are the components? Um, do we have a lot of shade? Do we have a lot of, uh, open, full sun? Uh, that will play a big role in how much water we need and how often we need to water.

The first thing is looking at, uh, the existing conditions of our landscape. Uh, and inventory, taking inventory of what exists.

And that’s probably the biggest question; what do we do once we figure out what we have and what are the next steps there? So that’s kind of the next step down the road.

Efficient Watering Methods for Home Gardens

[00:05:45] Erin Hoover: What are some of the more efficient watering methods for, for home gardens and how do they compare in efficiency and cost and things like that?

[00:05:56] Austin Little: So there’s, yeah, there’s a range of irrigation practices and methods, and some are going to be more efficient than others.

The research tends to indicate that drip irrigation or soaker hose irrigation, uh, are going to be the most efficient over time and in most situations. And that’s really because if you think of the way that those systems work, they’re delivering irrigation water directly to the roots, or at least directly to the soil.

Uh, sometimes they can be buried under mulch or a little bit of soil or media, whatever we’re using drip tape or, or soaker hoses. So, drip tape is kind of a flexible, uh, plastic, uh, irrigation line, and it’s got orifices in it that drip out water directly to the plants adjacent to it.

[00:07:00] And soaker hoses are a similar situation. They’re just, it’s like a porous hose, so they’re just releasing water, trickling water into the soil that’s gonna be probably the most efficient that a, uh, gardener can use for watering. And so that those types of watering lines, they’re directly watering the soil.

The one thing we need to think about there, among other considerations, but think about the soil that we’re using because that’ll affect how far out water can spread or absorb.

So it’s kind of a fan of absorption from a drip line or a drip tape. Uh, so we need, yeah, we need to understand, you know, what is the watering capacity of, of drip lines and drip tape or, uh, soaker hoses and, uh, how much ground, how much area will those cover so that we’re not missing areas?

[00:08:00] Thinking about that, you’ve got a lot of lines going everywhere, you know, in beds where we can cover it with mulch, that’s gonna be great. You know, it’s outta sight, outta mind.

Where we get into needing a different type of watering system is turf. Uh, that’s probably not going to work as well. Uh, for turf, we typically need some kind of sprinkler head or sprinkler system, and that’s going to be on the less efficient side of the spectrum.

That’s going to be where we’re, where we’re losing more water to evapotranspiration, uh, because that water is flying through the air. So depending on the time of day, how hot it is, you can lose a significant amount of water, uh, from a sprinkler system just to evapotranspiration from it evaporating in the air and on the ground.

[00:09:00] Once it hits the ground, it can, it can just get, you know, sucked back up into, into the atmosphere before it can get to the plants. That is kind of the reason that sprinklers are a little less efficient. So, it depends on the application. So there are situations where you can use both, you can have kind of a hybrid, uh, model where you have drip and you have sprinklers depending on what you’re needing to do with it.

Generally, yeah the more efficient side of that is going to be drip tape soakers. Now, if it’s a smaller area, like a smaller bed, we could probably get away with hand watering. We’re probably gonna hand water containers too. We’re not gonna have some kind of emitter going into a container. Unless we’re really fancy.

But yeah, hand watering for those is going to be fine. It just depends on the amount that we’re hand watering. It can be time-consuming. And there are other things, if we don’t have drip tape or we don’t have sprinklers, uh, we can use water bags for trees. That’s an easy solution.

Those are widely available. It’s just like a water bladder that you fill, and, uh, kind of wraps around a tree so that can provide water for a longer period of time. So yeah, on the range of efficiency, I would go towards, uh, drip tape or soaker hoses if you can.

Ideas for Watering Small Orchards

[00:10:10] Erin Hoover: So I’m curious for like, for small orchards, like we have a small hazelnut orchard and it’s about, I know, eight or nine trees, but I usually water overhead with a sprinkler just for the sake of the effort involved because we’re worried about running drip lines and mowing and things like that. So are there, is that kind of the best option in that scenario? or are there other options?

[00:10:35] Austin Little: That, for that type of scenario, for like a smaller scale operation or a small orchard, sprinklers might be the way to go and, you know, really, you know, rolling your hoses out and, and making sure you don’t run over ’em.

There definitely are larger scale for like agronomic scale. There’re large-scale sprinkler systems that are connected through solid, uh, plumbing solid main lines and that kind of thing. That gets into the larger scale side of it. Um, you can bury the lines to a drip system underground. So that, that is one option.

So, you, so you kind of have your, your main line for your drip tape that can be buried, and then you can have emitters on that main line that pops up, uh, to where you, so if you wanted to still try to do drip that could work, it would just take engineering to set that up.

But, uh, yeah, I can see where it can be, uh, obstacle. You know, things can get cluttered with drip lines going everywhere in like a place where you’re mowing or you know, weed eating, that kind of thing.

How to Determine When and How Much to Water Your Plants

[00:11:52] Erin Hoover: What is the best way for gardeners to determine when and how much water their plants, uh, need for maximum efficiency?

[00:12:00] Austin Little: Mm-hmm. That’s important. That’s definitely something, that’s a significant part of being efficient with our watering, and that’s going to require a little bit of maybe background research, doing a little bit of, uh, investigation on, uh, what our specific plants need in our landscape or in the plant communities that we’re kind of designing or curating, right? So that’s what we are doing when we are designing or curating right? We’re gardening and curating a landscape.

We need to know what those plants need. A good way to improve on our efficiency, uh, and balance of things in the landscape is to try that get along together, uh, you know, that have similar needs, similar requirements, and, uh, can, uh, get by with the same amount of water. So, species that are similar in their cultural requirements can help with that.

[00:13:00] That’s going to determine when we need to water, and how much we need to water. So understanding the specific cultural requirements will, will be key there. You know, a lot of perennial species or perennial shrubs, they’re gonna need water starting, uh, in early summer or whenever we start to run out of rain and it starts to get warm.

And, uh, longer days, hotter days, more sun, uh, that’s going to inform us on, on when we need to start watering and how much, so larger plants are gonna need a higher frequency of watering and new trees are going to be the highest water, uh, demand, that’s going to be the most needy when they’re in their establishment period.

So we need to understand some, you know, some physiology, some, how does this tree live in the environment. What does it need from the environment? Where yeah, what, how does it survive? And it’s, uh, if we can even go back to, its if it’s native, we can see the ecosystem that it naturally adapted to, and we can look at that too, to inform us on the watering needs of that, of that type of plant.

[00:14:00] Is it from a more dry environment? Is it from a more, uh, riparian maybe? So, yeah, looking at those, uh, factors can inform us on watering amounts and, uh, timing of watering generally. For conserving water and being the most efficient with our water use we want to try to water at night if possible. Uh, that’s, and it’s kind of counterintuitive, you know, out, out there with the headlamp, uh, watering your, your, your trees and your uh, perennial beds.

[00:15:00] But if we can water at night, especially in the warm part of the year, uh, or as close to the morning as you can. Uh, that’s going to be the most efficient use, whether you’re using sprinklers or, uh, drip tape or, you know, any combination of that. That way we’re getting water into the ground before we start to lose it from evapotranspiration, right?

When that plant is starting to get active, because it’s going to start to photosynthesize, it’s going to start to, uh, you know undergo all of its living stuff, uh, you know, all of its activity during, during the day. Uh, so we’re getting it to where it needs to be at the beginning of the day, and that can help that tree tolerate stress throughout the day more efficiently.

That, that, that would be some ways to, uh, water at the right time. I guess also just understanding plants’ life cycles, right? So the times the year that plants need more water, uh, than less so. Early summer into the hotter part of the year, plants are going to need more water. Uh, as we get into fall, they’re gonna need less.

[00:16:00] Uh, so when we get to where we start to have our first frost, uh, whenever that might be it, it, these days, it’s hard to say right when, when our first frost happens, but, uh, that’s where we can pretty much back off of water most of the time. But, uh, yeah, just doing a little study on, on the plants that we’re using. So having a better understanding of the plants that we’re promoting in our landscapes.

Common Watering Mistakes

[00:16:22] Erin Hoover: So are there common mistakes that gardeners make, uh, when it comes to watering that can actually cause more harm than good?

[00:16:29] Austin Little: Oh, I think so. I think that, uh, you know, watering, we do that with the best of intentions, right? Uh, sometimes our best intentions can be harmful to the plants, uh, that we love.

But yeah, it’s one of those things where, uh, too much of a good thing can be a bad thing. In my experience, it seems like the tendency is to overwater. So, a lot of landscape, even landscape managers, uh, or, uh, landscape, uh, practitioners, uh, overwatering tends to be the default rather than underwatering.

[00:17:00] But overwatering can have just as negative effects as underwatering, if not more. Over time, overwatering can stress a plant out. Uh, because we’re taking oxygen away from the roots if we’re overwatering and maybe leaching out nutrients. Uh, so we’re, uh, putting that plant, uh, into, um, into a little bit more stress than it otherwise would be in.

So the way to kind of, uh, avoid that is maybe, you know, if we can come up with a schedule for watering. We know who’s watering. Overlapping watering can happen, um, where we have more than one, uh, person watering. But, uh, having a schedule, uh, keeping an eye on the weather. So if we’re getting enough rain, we can skip watering, and having a timer.

[00:18:00] So if we have a watering system, uh, there’s pretty easy to use. Uh, pretty affordable. Uh, automatic timers that, that we can use to schedule watering. So, uh, we can start to be a little bit smarter, about when we’re watering. The time of day, again, the time of day that we’re watering can really increase, uh, the effective use of our irrigation.

And you can take it a step further. If you want to get very advanced and get into some technology, you can use moisture sensors. So, it’s just like a little moisture sensor that you can get. They range in price.

Now, you would have to have some kind of smart watering, uh, system or control unit, uh, to connect this to. But if you want it to, you can place, uh, moisture sensors in your soil. And so, in, uh, when I worked for the city if Denver this was something we were getting into.

[00:19:00] In our planters, we were using moisture sensors to then adjust the amount of water that the watering system delivers based on if we got rain or if we didn’t get rain. So, so we have basically, you set a threshold of the level of moisture, uh, that’s, that’s being, uh, monitored in your planting or in your soil. So if goes, if it goes past that, that threshold. Boom. Your sprinklers turn on. You have a watering event.

Um, so you’re maintaining, uh, a, a certain level of moisture and that can change throughout the year. If you have that kind of system, you, you can monitor the data from, uh, the internet basically uploads to the internet, and you can check it on your phone. You can change it from your phone. That’s next level. That’s super high-tech.

Homeowners can do that if, if they’re so inclined. So yeah, those, those are some ways to, to, uh, maximize efficiency.

Waterwise Strategies to Maintain a Productive Garden

[00:20:02] Erin Hoover: Early on, you mentioned waterwise gardening. So, what are some waterwise strategies that can help reduce water use while maintaining a productive garden?

[00:20:12] Austin Little: So Waterwise Landscaping is great. It’s a great practice. So, it’s a landscape practice that was, uh, developed in Colorado, I believe, and in kind of the Denver area. So, they developed that in the early 2000s. And, uh, Waterwise Landscaping at its core is a way to lay out your landscape in zones depending on the water needs of those zones.

So, you, you kind of split your landscape into what they call, uh, hydro zones. And in each of these hydro zones you want to design it so that whatever plant material you have in that, in that zone has more or less the same water needs. Uh, so zone one, that is defined as like, the most visible part of your landscape.

[00:21:00] So maybe that’s like the front part of your house, um, where you, where you got your curb appeal, or maybe it’s more of a uh, amenity part of your landscape. Maybe it’s out by, uh, your back porch, uh, where you’ve got the barbecue, where you spend a lot of time outside. That might also be zone one. It’s the highest use, most high visibility where you want your most pretty, visible plants so you can have some, a little bit more water need there.

That might be where we have our turf. If we need turf in our landscape, that could be where we have turf. So turf would be zone one.

[00:22:00] Then you have zone two, which is like that next step in the water needs. So that might be, uh, an area that we don’t use as much. We still want to have some plantings in, we want it to be landscaped, but the question is, does it need to be turf? If there’s a part of our landscape that we rarely ever use, or if it’s just to look pretty, we need to consider that maybe turf isn’t the best option, or it isn’t the most efficient or the most cost-effective.

The conventional landscape design idea of creating, planting, isolated, planting beds in a vast sea of turf is not the most effective. So we’re, we want to flip that and start to create a vast sea of, uh, woody perennials and trees, uh, shrubs, ground cover, native plants and some mulch in those areas. And maybe we can have islands of turf rather than turf being the dominant feature. So in that second zone, we are trying to see if we can remove even more turf.

[00:23:07] Third and fourth. So, it depends on how many zones, you can have as many, you know, one zero to five zones, but in generally three to four, that’s going to be the driest area of the waterwise landscape in this design approach. Uh, where we have more xeric plants, so plants that maybe are more adaptable to a desert-type climate, prickly pear or something like that.

Grasses are also, uh, a great option for that very dry zone. And that can, that’s like on the side of your house, around your utilities. It’s also great to plant around your utilities to increase your uh, energy efficiency. But, um, yeah, those areas, they need, uh, the lowest level of water. That’s the basic foundation of Waterwise Landscaping, is dividing the landscape into different uses of water.  

[00:24:20] Overall though a great tip there is creating shade. So by creating a, uh, canopy, a shade canopy and an understory, we can plant a lot of things that maybe wouldn’t do so well in full sun, maybe part sun, part shade. Uh, so it opens up some other possibilities.

I love shade gardens. Uh, I think they’re, they’re a part, they’re a component of any landscape.

Uh, great to hang out in, during, during the heat of the day, but as far as our use our resource use, uh, it’s going to dramatically reduce evapotranspiration in that understory. So water will stick around for longer and it’s going to cool the environment all around uh, those, uh, the trees that we’re getting shade and everything from.

Ways Home Gardeners Can Harvest and Reuse Water on Their Property

[00:25:00] Erin Hoover: Uh, what are some of the ways that home gardeners can, um, harvest and reuse the water on their property?

[00:25:07] Austin Little: That’s another component of Waterwise Landscaping is trying to recycle water or capture water as much as we can. Uh, rain barrels are an easy way to do that, so you can connect rain barrels to your downspouts or your gutter. Either way, you can use like a rain chain to connect rain from your roof, just directly from the gutter on, on the corner of your roof into a rain barrel, uh, to collect rain or from your gutter. Either way.

And you can do it on, you know, any corner of your, of your house where, where there’s runoff from your, uh, drainage systems. Great way to store saved water that you can then reuse for watering.

There are some other, let’s see, there’s uh, rain barrels. There are, well, rain gardens. That’s, kind of a, uh, a whole different topic of discussion.

[00:26:05] Rain gardens are kind of short-circuiting the drainage that would otherwise go into, uh, stormwater management systems in the gray infrastructure. So storm sewers basically. So, you’re catching that water in a designed part of your landscape that’s kind of got a dip in it so it’s lower than the surrounding level of your landscape.

Um, so it’s, yeah, it’s a kind of a bowl and you can catch water that way. Uh, there’s a lot more to rain gardens than that. I could talk about rain gardens for another hour, but yeah. You utilizing some stormwater kind of management systems like that.

Uh, cisterns are a thing that houses used to have a hundred years ago, uh, which are just underground water storage containment systems.

[00:27:00] So, yeah, people used to collect as much water as they could when it was available and use it for any number of things. You don’t see cisterns very much anymore, but, uh, we, you know, rain barrels are a good solution.

I’ve seen people do gray water recycling, so I’ll say with gray water, recycling in, in my past experience in Denver, Colorado, there are a lot of interesting water restriction laws due to water rights.

And so I’m not, uh, totally familiar with those, uh, laws in Washington. Now in Denver, they just now let them, they opened up the restriction on rain barrels. So, uh, up to a couple of years ago, you weren’t allowed to have rain barrels in Denver due to water rights laws. So pretty strict. I don’t think it’s that strict in Washington.

[00:27:59] With regard to gray water, um, just may maybe be a little cautious with gray water. There can be things in there that plants might not really be happy with in, in our gray water. So just be careful and if you’re thinking about gray water, just make sure you, you know, the local laws and, and restrictions on if you’re allowed to recycle, uh, gray water.

I think though, rain barrels are a pretty safe bet for stormwater catchment.

[00:28:24] Erin Hoover: Yeah, to my knowledge, gray water systems are legal in Washington, but they have very, very specific criteria and you really have to work with somebody who knows the system really well to be able to, to comply with the law, but also not harm your plants of course.

And we do, we have a whole episode on, um, with a master gardener who built her own rain garden. Um, so I can link to that too if people want to learn more about rain gardens specifically.

Top Three Easiest Ways to Make Your Garden More Water-Efficient

[00:29:00] Erin Hoover: So what are probably the top three easiest things that gardeners can do to start making their gardens more water efficient?

[00:29:01] Austin Little: See, top three? Uh, well, I think the first step there is going to be assessing the current situation of our landscape, what’s our current situation, so that we have a clear understanding of, of what we can improve, and where we can improve. So just taking inventory I think would be the first step.

Looking at, uh, we talked about types of irrigation. How do we get water to our plants? Is there room for improvement there? And some of these can be experiments. We can try out a little bit, you know, kind of uh, trial and error. Um, see what works. So, we can try that. We can, we can try a little drip tape somewhere.

[00:29:56] Once we have an understanding though, once we have some information, then we can start to look at, uh, can we use Waterwise Landscaping designs? Or can we use Water Landscaping guides? So there’s a lot of guides for municipal water landscaping programs now, uh, Spokane, City of Spokane has a program, so they have a lot of great information and planting guides on what types of plants will work together in different parts of, of, like we talked about hydro zoning.

Um, so they have plant pallets, uh, that’ll work together in, in, uh, hopefully, uh, successful designs in your landscape.

Uh, you know, looking at soil. So taking a look at what kind of condition our soil is in, if there’s room for improvement there. I will say that mulching is one of the best things we can do in combination with the way that we water and when we water to help retain water in the soil.

[00:31:00] And it kind of goes hand in hand, uh, using, and, and when I say mulch, I’m referring to natural wood mulch. So I’m not talking about rock mulch or, or synthetic mulch. I’m talking about natural wood mulch. Um, and so using mulch has so many benefits uh, like retaining water, but it also helps build soil structure and it, and over time, feeds the soil.

So as that mulch naturally decomposes it, it will add organic matter. It’ll build organic matter in the soil, which creates better porosity, better drainage, better nutrient holding capacity. Um, so all those things will be better for our plants, help them establish better root structures. Uh, so yeah, that’d be maybe the next step.

Third, let’s see, just, uh, look at the plants that we’re using. So selecting plants that are adaptable to the extremes, like I talked about, uh, earlier. Adapting to extremes. So looking at native plants where we can, and a great place to find information on native plants is botanic garden websites, Extension, definitely.

[00:32:00] Again. Yeah, the, if we can find the, uh, Xeriscaping, which is pretty similar to Waterwise Landscaping. Um, so finding those guides. If, if our city or our town has a waterwise program, there’s a lot of great resources that can, uh kind lead us in the right direction on there. So learn, getting, getting as much information as we can. Uh, learning about our landscape, learning about the plants in our landscape.

I think fourth, uh, fourth thing we can do again, uh, creating a canopy. So creating layers of our landscape. Creating an understory, uh, will have a lot of benefits for, uh, especially in water landscaping.

Final Thoughts About Gardening and Water Efficiency

[00:32:48] Erin Hoover: All right, so we’ll um, try to link to some of the WSU resources on waterwise gardening in the show notes as well. Do you have any final thoughts about waterwise gardening and water efficiency?

[00:33:00] Austin Little: Just that it can be an iterative process. Something that we keep working at and try to improve on, and uh, diversity, plant diversity. So trying to get a wide range of different types of plants in our landscape that are similar in requirements and similar in, in their, uh, needs, but that have those qualities that we’re looking for, that where, where they’re tolerant to not only, uh, drought, but they’re also tolerant to maybe being inundated in water for a little bit, and tolerant to the more frequent extremes in weather that we have.

By doing that, we create kind of, you can think of it as creating a strong team, uh, with different, different attributes. So different plants are better at some things, you know, worse at others. But overall, if we have diversity, that’s kind of hedging our bets, right? Uh, if we have a really nasty weather event, a long drought, some things may not work very well.

We may have to look at the landscape because we have diversity. We can say, well, this is doing great. This over here, my hydrangea, uh, it’s suffering. Let’s look at some alternatives. So, so having diversity is good. Diversity is great for a high-performing landscape.

So I think that would be my, my closing comments on, on Waterwise Landscaping or efficient watering.

[00:34:37] Erin Hoover: All right. Well, thank you for joining me today, Austin.

[00:34:40] Austin Little: Thank you Erin. A pleasure to be here, and thank you for having me.

[00:34:45] Erin Hoover: Thank you for joining us on this episode of The Evergreen Thumb, brought to you by the WSU Extension Master Gardener Program volunteers and sponsored by the Master Gardener Foundation of Washington State.

We hope that today’s discussion has inspired and equipped you with valuable insights to nurture your garden.

The Master Gardener Foundation of Washington State is a nonprofit organization whose primary purpose is to provide unifying support and advocacy for WSU Extension Master Gardener programs throughout Washington State.

[00:35:00] To support the Master Gardener Foundation of Washington State, visit www.mastergardenerfoundation.org/donate.

Whether you’re an experienced Master Gardener or just starting out, the WSU Extension Master Gardener program is here to support you every step of the way. WSU Extension Master Gardeners empower and sustain diverse communities with relevant, unbiased, research-based horticulture education.

Reach out to your local WSU Extension office to connect with master gardeners and tap into a wealth of resources that can help you achieve gardening success. To learn more about the program or how to become a Master Gardener, visit www.mastergardener.wsu.edu/get-involved.

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The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed by guests of this podcast are their own and do not imply endorsement by Washington State University or the Master Gardener Foundation of Washington State.