What's the tuna can watering trick? | GET GROWING!
Channel: WTOL11
Date: 01/08/2020

This is a very common question and has many different answers. I wish it was easy to say one hour equals one inch of moisture, but there are so many variables. Every good pump or watering system has a different pressure so everyone has a different volume of water coming out of their spigot. And there are hundreds of delivery systems like the whirlygigs that spin and toss the water out into your lawn, or the slow arms that tick back and forth like a metronome. You have the stationary shower spray and the ratcheted shower spray that makes that familiar “chicka chicka chicka” cadence. 
There aren’t any wrong watering delivery systems, just more efficient ones. Wind, sunshine, dirt clogging the nozzles and obstructions are also variables in this little experiment. Don’t get overwhelmed. It is important to know how much water your specific equipment can throw on your lawn. I will simplify all of it for you.

BACKYARD SCIENCE - TUNA CAN TRICK

Ready for some fun backyard science? I love this stuff! On average, we want our turf to get one inch of water per week. That could be from rain showers or it could be from your sprinkler.
Here’s how you figure out how much water is getting on your lawn for a specific time period. I call it the tuna can trick. Get your typical sprinkler system ready to launch. It can be as simple as a sprinkler attached to the end of a hose or a really fancy irrigation system buried in your lawn. Set a clean tuna can in the spray cycle. You can even set three or four of them around your yard to get an average.
Turn on the sprinkler for one hour between 6am and 8am. The time of day is important and is part of the simple experiment. Here is some fun meteorology- the winds are usually very light around dawn and there is usually high moisture content in the morning. Early morning temps drop a degree just before dawn, so this is the coolest and quietest part of the day. That means it is the best time to water any part of your garden.
After you have had your sprinkler on for exactly one hour, check the tuna cans. Note the amount of water in each can, in each region of your turf. You need to do a bit of simple math now. Add all of the amounts together and divide them by the number of cans out in the test area. This will give you an average amount of water that comes from your spigot in an hour through your current watering system.
Now that you have this data, you will know how long it takes for your sprinkler to spit out an inch of water in one cycle. If this one-hour test only gave you a quarter-inch of water in the can, then you know that your output is ¼” per hour. We want to get to one inch per week. So you could set it for two hours, two days a week, and your turf would be happy.
Isn’t backyard science fun?! 
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