Pineapple is a strange plant to write a drip irrigation guide about. It’s a CAM species, which means it does its gas exchange at night instead of during the day. Its stomata stay shut while the sun is up. The…
Cotton has a reputation problem. Most people think of it as a dryland crop, something that gets by on whatever rain falls. That reputation is built on a half-truth. Cotton shrugs off drought better than corn or rice, no argument…
Okra is the crop everyone assumes doesn’t need irrigation. It handles heat, shrugs off dry spells, and keeps producing long after tomatoes have collapsed in the sun. That reputation is only half right. Okra survives drought, but it won’t produce…
Most ginger I have seen die did not die of thirst. It drowned. A ginger field that sits in saturated soil for three or four warm days is a field full of soft, waterlogged rhizomes that smell faintly of fermentation.…
Alfalfa is the quiet heavyweight of American irrigation. It drinks more water than any other crop in the Colorado River basin, somewhere around 4 to 5 acre-feet per acre every season in California and Arizona, and nearly all of that…
I have watched a lot of growers lose a season’s drip tape to a part that costs less than a tank of fuel. They will spend thousands on a pump, a filter, and kilometers of line, then skip the pressure…
A pistachio orchard is the highest-value drip decision most arid-climate growers will ever make, and the money in it has almost nothing to do with how much water you apply. It is about when. Water a pistachio tree generously in…
Broccoli and cauliflower are not thirsty crops, and that is exactly why they get watered wrong. Both have shallow, fibrous root systems that rarely reach deeper than 18 inches, so they live on moisture in the top foot of soil.…
Mango trees are funny about water. Give them too much at the wrong moment and they put out a flush of leaves instead of flowers. Give them too little a month later and the young fruit drops off the panicle…
Garlic quietly rewards precision, and drip irrigation is how you deliver it. The crop does not need a huge volume of water compared to a tomato field, but it is completely unforgiving about when and how that water arrives. Get…
