Your office garden adds value to your property and brings numerous benefits to your staff’s work experience. But it’s not enough to just have a garden – you need to maintain and care for it to ensure it stays in the best possible shape. An unkempt garden, especially one that is dry and dying, can have a negative impact far worse than not having a garden at all.
One of the key jobs in establishing and caring for a commercial garden (or any green garden) is watering. To ensure your plants thrive and look their very best, it’s important to water them properly and on regular basis, depending on the season and weather conditions. Time restraints and water restrictions can make this a challenging task but there are a number of ways of watering that will allow you to get the job done quickly while saving water.
Practical watering tips for your office garden
1. Go with a gentle flow
While you might want to get the watering over and done with quickly, when watering by hand, avoid flooding your plants or soaking the earth with a powerful, hard gush of water. This can damage delicate plants and, if the ground is too hard, the water might bounce off it rather than seeping into it. Turn down the tap and set your hosepipe to a gentle spray. Pause to allow the water to percolate through flower beds and lawns. The watering of a particular area is done when small puddles no longer soak rapidly into the soil but start to form at the base of the plants leaving the soil moist.
2. Focus on the root zone
Focus your watering on moistening plant roots and the surrounding soil, rather than the leaves or foliage. Watering the leaves can lead to them being burnt by the sun or becoming diseased. It’s also important to remember that overwatering can be just as damaging as not watering at all – don’t drown your garden and don’t starve it.
3. Install a sprinkler system
Want to save time but still get the watering done properly? A sprinkler system with a timer is able to cover a lot more ground in a regular pattern than watering by hand. Also, make sure you use a breaker system that decreases the force of the water stream without decreasing the hose volume. This will ensure a steady stream of water that isn’t too hard on your plants and doesn’t pour unnecessary amounts of water all over the place. Go for a ‘gentle shower’ setting. It’s also essential that the system is properly installed or else you might miss key spots while overdoing others.
4. Have an indoor office garden?
Watering an indoor garden incorrectly can quickly spell the end of your green project. Whether you have potted plants, a container garden, or a vertical garden, carefully follow the care and watering instructions for each plant as every plant has different watering requirements. If watering from the top, allow the water to penetrate the soil and, if you are working with pots, let it run through but don’t let the plant sit in water once you’re done as this can rot the roots. If possible, you can also water from the bottom, allowing the plant to pull the water up from a base container – check the soil to make sure the plant is getting the right amount of water.
5. Think water wise
Watering a garden is a necessary part of keeping it beautiful but droughts and harsh weather conditions make water conservation an absolute must. There are lots of practical ways to get the water you need for your garden without unnecessary waste – put in place a watering system, fix any leaky taps, save grey water from the office kitchen and use that to water the garden, and install water-wise indigenous plants when you next add to your garden space.
Don’t have the time or skill to manage your office garden? Would love a corporate garden space that’s really blooming? Busy with a commercial garden project? Whatever type of corporate garden you’ll looking for, the Eco Balance team can help! We specialise in professional garden maintenance and can help you create, maintain, and grow the garden of your dreams.