Watering flowers

This picture is from Ron Geater's nursery at Leiston in Suffolk, showing his 'prize' Lysianthus.

Quotation from Ron Geater after a season of water monitoring.

'When we installed the first water monitoring system I felt it would be a useful way of checking we were 'getting it right' - it certainly proved we were miles adrift!' 'Last year's Alstromaria crop was the best ever and the quality was also far better than we have achieved in the past. We saw far less tip burn than usual even though we did not shade our glass. Also, we had a far lower incidence of Pithium than in previous years.' 'This coming season we will be monitoring the Lisianthus crops, which are quite different and we look forward to building up a profile on these as well.'

As with all crops the grower needs to know when his soil is 'full', how deep the crop is using water, when to water and how much to apply. In the graph below the 'stepping' is the difference between day and night water use. Big strong 'steps' represent good growth rates - when this slows the crop 'suffers'. It has not happened in this crop.

This is a separate graph of the one above. You can see that the majority of the water use is in the top 10cm, unitl the 13th May when water use began at 20cm and a tiny amount at 30cm. Note the change of shape of the steps from the 23rd May - this was when the crop was being picked.   {Back to the index}