When to Water a plant? By Lucy Liu

Plants can bring people enjoyable feelings by their joyful outlooks and their special fragrances. They are also much easier to take care compare to pets, basically all they would need is soil with nutritions and water. Most of families are growing plants in their house or in gardens. However, lack with water or overwatering problems could easily cause damage to the plants. So how can we avoid these problems and what is the right way to water a plant?

First of all, we need to know the wilted weight for the plant with the pot. Allow the plant to dry until it wilts. Weight the pot, media, and plant on a gram scale Second, we need to measure the watered weight. Water the media thoroughly and allow the pot to drain completely, and then we weight the pot, media and plant like we did on the first step. Then, we could calculate the total available water in milliliters. This calculation can be accomplished because there is the relationship that one gram of water is equal to one milliliters. So for the available water amount just the difference from the wilted weight and the watered weight for the plant with the pot, which is basically Subtract the step two weight from the step one weight. After that, we could know the rand of when watering should occur, because the most common range is when 60 to 80% of the available water is lost from the pot, which is the the number we got from last step timed 0.6 to the number from last step timed 0.8. A crop that should be keep moist may be watered with 50% of the available lost, and it should be kept dry may be watered when 85% of the available water is lost. And finally we all need to do is to water the plant when the target weight has been reached.

I learned this method from my horticulture lab and I think this would be very helpful for people to know when to water their plants and keep them healthy.