At this time of the year in southern Arizona most gardeners are concerned about getting enough water to their plants. May and June here in Cochise County are the hottest and driest months of the year. The caliche and clay soil in most of my yard is now baked as hard as concrete, and I can actually watch my plants desiccate in the hot, dry winds.

Getting water to the roots of plants under these conditions is very difficult. If you apply the water too fast, most of it runs off and the rest wets only a thin layer of soil just below the surface. The trick is to apply the water very slowly over a long period of time. I have developed a system to help me water my trees and shrubs that does just that. Using this system I leave the water on for several hours (sometimes even overnight) and can thoroughly wet the soil around my plants to a depth of three feet or more. Even under the hottest and driest conditions, the trees watered this way can go for a week or more between drinks.

The system is easily made out of materials that are readily and cheaply available in any hardware store or garden shop. The heart of the system is the black weeping soaker hose made out of recycled automobile tires. You can either buy this hose in bulk without fittings or in 25 or 50 foot lengths with male and female fittings installed. I cut up pieces of a 50 foot hose that had suffered an accident and needed repair anyway. The other materials required are two female hose couplings of the kind you can install yourself and a "Y" fitting with shutoff valves. The whole lot shouldn't run much more than ten dollars.

To construct the system, cut a piece of the hose to a length that will form a circle large enough to fit just inside the drip line of the tree or shrub you want to water. You should remember being taught back in the fifth grade or so that the circumference of a circle is pi times the diameter, where pi is equal to a little more than 3. To figure out how long to cut the hose, measure the diameter of the drip line circle you want to water and cut the hose to three times that length. Now attach a female coupling to each end of the hose. To finish the construction, all you need to do is attach the female end of "Y" fitting to the end of a regular hose and each of the female coupling on the ends of your soaker hose to the other ends of the "Y". If you want to water a larger plant, you can extend the length of the soaker hose with another soaker hose that has male and female fittings on either end.

To use the system, fasten the soaker hose around the plant you want to water and turn the water on very slowly (a 5 gal/hr delivery rate works well for me). Leave the soaker on for several hours until the soil is wetted to a depth of two to three feet. By shutting both valves on the "Y" fitting, you can unfasten the soaker from one plant and move it to another without having to change the delivery rate of the water at the faucet. Happy watering.