A couple picture of newbie tomato plants

dice · June 10, 2009

Overhead watering is deprecated. Getting the foliage wet
increases the incidence of foliar fungal diseases, which are
the bane of tomato growers. Rain is risky enough, and we
cannot do much about that growing outdoors, but we can
decline to add to the risk ourselves with overhead watering.
(It will usually soak in through the grass clippings ok.)

What a lot of people do is put soaker hoses (or drilled pvc
pipe, drip lines with emitters, drip tape, etc) underneath their
mulch. The plants still get irrigated, but there is no splash up
onto the foliage.

Here is a thread with a lot of useful discussion of using pvc pipe
instead of soaker hoses. This one was gravity fed from a couple
of big barrels (and it worked, by the way):

http://www.tomatoville.com/showthrea...ght=irrigation

June 10, 2009	#16
dice Tomatovillian™ Join Date: Jan 2007 Location: PNW Posts: 4,743	Overhead watering is deprecated. Getting the foliage wet increases the incidence of foliar fungal diseases, which are the bane of tomato growers. Rain is risky enough, and we cannot do much about that growing outdoors, but we can decline to add to the risk ourselves with overhead watering. (It will usually soak in through the grass clippings ok.) What a lot of people do is put soaker hoses (or drilled pvc pipe, drip lines with emitters, drip tape, etc) underneath their mulch. The plants still get irrigated, but there is no splash up onto the foliage. Here is a thread with a lot of useful discussion of using pvc pipe instead of soaker hoses. This one was gravity fed from a couple of big barrels (and it worked, by the way): http://www.tomatoville.com/showthrea...ght=irrigation __________________ -- alias