Taken from Eclectic Gardener @ www.teachinggarden.org
Written by Alan Hickman

In a list of "9 mistakes that gardeners make", which appears in the current issue of Ontario Gardener magazine, mistake number three caught my eye. "Bagging and disposing of grass clippings" it is headed, and the writer states: "This is one of the stupidest practices going."
One of the first garden columns I wrote (1998) said much the same thing although, back then, I was far too new and insecure to imply that the practice was actually ‘stupid’. Almost ten years on, during which much ink and many column inches have been devoted to reasons for leaving grass clippings on the lawn where they belong, I’m emboldened to add to ‘stupid’ such pejoratives as ignorant, perverse, incompetent, wasteful and environmentally degenerate. Not necessarily in that order!
Annoyingly, the same individuals who inflict bagging lawnmowers on their grass are often the same ones whoemploy the even more stupid practice of trying to water lawns with hand-held sprayers.
The 1998 column noted that, as a rule-of-thumb, lawngrass needs about 1" of water a week to keep it green. On a 25 x 25 foot lawn, 1" is equivalent to about 300 gallons of water - about what an unrestricted tap running at full force would pass in one hour. As the hand spraying perpetrators often connect maybe 50 feet of cheap half-inch hose to the faucet - which lowers the water pressure and flow rate - just how much water do they suppose actually gets on to the lawn through the one little hole in the squirter?
While lawn-squirting perps are easy targets for ridicule, asking students at Peel Teaching Garden to water a row of potatoes shows how little thought most gardeners have ever given to this most basic of gardening tasks. It should be understood that, while a few PTG students are novices, the majority who attend the classes in winter, and work-off their equivalent hours in the gardens over the summer, are already long-time practitioners of the garden arts. Many attendees have gardened for twenty or thirty years; some are qualified Master Gardeners, and most already have gardens of which their neighbours would be proud.
The two basic requirements of irrigation are 1. get water to the roots of plants and nowhere else and 2. do so as quickly as is practical. To meet these requirements there should be no fitting on the end of the hose. Water needs to be exiting the hose as fast as will just not wash the plants out of the ground and the end of the hose needs to be as close to the soil as possible - no more than two or three inches above the surface.Holding the hose so that it dangles like an elephant’s trunk, it takes maybe one second or less to get the equivalent of an inch of water around a young potato or a newly planted marigold or an impatience transplant. Using this method, a sixty foot row of newly emerged potato plants takes little more than two minutes to hand water, and it leaves dry all the soil that doesn’t contain potato roots. Wetting soil that does not contain the roots of wanted plants not only wastes water, it encourages plants you don’t want - weeds!
It is not easy to get adults to change their long practiced ways of doing things but, eventually - like water into well-husbanded soil, the practicality of open-hose irrigation does sink in.
About the only use for a hose-end fitting is for watering some potted plants and flats of seedlings and for watering seed-beds. For these purposes, avoid all the fancy and expensive multi-jet multi-pattern whim-wams and get a simple two or three foot long wand with as big a rose on the end as you can find. The larger the diameter of the rose and the more holes it has in it, the softer will be the flow of water and the more water it will pass.
As we approach July - typically the month when the most water is used in gardens - and with the forecast threat of a stinking hot summer, using water efficiently needs to be on the mind of every conscientious gardener.
Having got moisture into the soil, it needs to be kept there with a copious layer of mulch. At PTG, we’remulching with old hay and straw - because we didn’t get any leaves last fall - but anything that is cheap and plentiful, that will both cover the surface and slowly break down to feed soil organisms, will do.
As for lawns, grass is a cool weather crop and its survival strategy is to go dormant and brown when summer heat sets in. Cutting grass long - as high as the mower can be set - will stave off the onset of browning but, inevitably, it will happen until rain and cool weather are again forthcoming. In the fifties, a green summer- lawn was a status symbol; now it is a sign of uncaring waste. As we get used to the idea of conserving what little we have left of the natural world, if there is to be any front lawn at all, it is brown grass in summer which shows that somebody cares. Remember, the neighbours are watching!