Irrigation Mastery Blog

By Lori Palmquist 

As the rainy season winds down and spring irrigation startup is steadily creeping toward us, it’s time to prepare your irrigation system for the busy growing season ahead. The following recommendations are meant to give you direction for ensuring your irrigation is in top conditi...

By Lori Palmquist

It’s September, and the leaves are turning color, detaching, and floating to the Earth to form a mantle that feeds and shelters the soil and the resident soil organisms.

Best to Ramp Back Watering August-December

Nature is signaling to us that it’s time to ramp back on our irrig...

By Lori Palmquist

I LOVE LOVE LOVE smart controllers! Since 2007, I've installed 56 of them. I still monitor a few of the ones I've installed and managed over the years. Of these 56 controllers, there were 15 different models. And seven of those 15 no longer exist on the market. So, smart controlle...

by Lori Palmquist

I gave a UC Master Gardener webinar on July 16, 2024 that was co-sponsored by the Contra Costa County Library.

In some of the other webinars I've given in the past few years, every time I mentioned mulch, the questions came flying in from the attendees. Greg Letts, who often w...

by Lori Palmquist

The 20th annual PG&E Water Conservation Showcase is featuring a ton of education talks and events, and our hands-on sprinkler-to-drip workshop is one of them. My friend and colleague Kim Titus* and I will be converting two existing sprinkler zones to drip in this all-day workshop ...

by Lori Palmquist

Despite the deluges we experienced back in October and December of last year, we find ourselves slipping more deeply into a state of drought as spring begins. The Drought Monitor website https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/Maps/MapArchive.aspx informs us that 100% of California is alre...

by Lori Palmquist

People often ask me how to apply drip to trees and how long to water. The method I’ll show you is the way I drip trees that don’t have landscape plants beneath their canopies. When trees have plants beneath them, I handle them as part of the landscape area that includes all the...

On July 13, 2021, I gave an important talk in the form of a Zoom webinar to give the public some simple strategies for managing landscape water during drought. I gave the talk on behalf of the UC Master Gardeners of Contra Costa County.

See the video at the following link:  https://youtu.be/sHpBpt6...

by Lori Palmquist

“Are you one of those tree huggers?”

This was the first thing I was asked as I introduced myself to my fellow students at an irrigation training in Dallas. I was surrounded by a sea of 10-gallon hats and huge belt buckles. The shaded eyes of all peered at me intently, awaiting my...

Guide for Monthly Irrigation Schedule Adjustment

Reprinted from an article I wrote for the Contra Costa County UC Master Gardener newsletter in June 2021.

by Lori Palmquist

Since we are officially in drought again (August 2021), and the water companies are asking us to cut back, I have some su...

By Lori Palmquist

This is the third of a three-part post on irrigation scheduling. To read part two, click here, and to read part one, click here. 

In this last post of the series, I’m sharing the web application I use in my practice. It’s a tool I created several years ago to make the tasks I per...

By Lori Palmquist

This is the second part of a three-part post on irrigation scheduling. (To read part one, click here.)

As I said in part one of this post, I was asked by a survey respondent recently to talk about how to translate how much water each plant in the landscape needs … into irrigation...