Maintenance

3 Tips for Irrigating Your Home’s Foundation

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Ensuring that the soil surrounding your home’s foundation has the right moisture levels is important. This is especially true in areas like Texas that have expansive soil conditions.

Sadly, foundation irrigation isn’t a widely taught practice, but it can have immense benefits for your home. Specifically, it can help you avoid costly foundation repairs.

Extended dry periods can cause the soil beneath your home’s foundation to shrink. When this happens, your home will gradually settle. Unfortunately, the sinking doesn’t occur uniformly.

One part of your house may settle more than the others. This differential settling is what may cause your foundation to crack and eventually to fail.

When it rains, the expansive clay soil absorbs water and swells. The swollen soil then pushes up against your home’s foundation causing it to crack. Besides the cracks, you may also notice that your doors and windows are becoming difficult to open and close.

More extreme damage occurs when cracks in the foundation cause the brick veneer to crack or separate, chimneys to shift and pipes to break.

To mitigate these forms of damages, you need to irrigate your home’s foundation. In this article, the experts from Granite Foundation Repair, a foundation repair company servicing DFW area, share important tips on how to determine when and how much you should water your home’s foundation.

1.    Create a dedicated irrigation zone around the house for the watering foundation.

If you have a watering system, create a dedicated irrigation zone for your foundation. Mixed zones are tough with the unbalanced water requirements for all the plants. On the other hand, a dedicated zone allows the watering to be consistent.

While watering systems vary widely in design, a drip watering system works best in this regard. This is essential because drip delivers water at a very slow rate – which is usually a drip at a time.

You should install it near your foundation and schedule the watering accordingly.

2.    Plant, grow, and water plants around the foundation.

Plants surrounding your home’s foundation help minimize soil erosion and moderate soil temperature. In addition, plants help shade the soil from excessive evaporation of soil moisture.

If drought restrictions limit how much you can irrigate, ensure that the irrigation method is as efficient as possible. Make sure that your sprinklers are working at their best. Ensure that the settings on your irrigation controller are set to short cycles rather than long cycles.

You could also further reduce moisture loss by adding mulch under the shrubs.

3. Attach a soaker hose or a drip irrigation to an outdoor faucet with a timer when watering the foundation.

Here are the options that you may choose:

a. If you don’t have a watering system for your foundation, protect your foundation by installing either a soaker hose or a drip irrigation around your foundation. Next, connect the system to the outdoor faucet.

Generally speaking, soaker hoses work best when placed 8 to 18 inches away from the foundation. Prior to connecting the soaker hose to the faucet, ensure that the faucet has a backflow preventer. The backflow preventer helps keep contaminated water from re-entering your household.

If it’s your first time running the soaker house, first remove the end cap and run water via the hose to remove any debris.

Soaker hoses work best at minimum pressure. In fact, most of them come with a pressure restrictor. If yours doesn’t have a restrictor (looks like a plastic disc), turn on the faucet so water comes out gently.

b. Drip irrigation is also another good option when you don’t have an irrigation system. It’s available at some garden centers, irrigation supply businesses, and large hardware stores.

Just like a soaker hose, ensure that yours has a backflow preventer on the faucet.

Drip watering also requires a drip watering filter. The filters help keep the nozzle openings from clogging. For connivance, add a timer.

Various drip watering timers are available that are battery-powered for setting irrigation. It can be your best investment when you’re not there to turn the water on, or when you forget to turn it off and run up your water bill.

Faucet timers are also available. However, unlike drip irrigation timers, it only turns the water off. It won’t help when it comes to turning the water on.

To summarize, before creating a foundation watering schedule, here are the factors to consider:

  • What will I be watering my foundation with? Will it be a soaker hose, a garden hose, or a drip irrigation system?
  • What season are we currently in?
  • Does any of my foundation get more sun or shade than others?
  • What type of soil do I have? (In Texas, it’s expansive clay soils.)

A home’s foundation is as essential as it sounds. Without a proper foundation, a myriad of structural issues can plague your home. To keep your foundation solid and strong, it’s important to irrigate it. This is especially true in areas like Texas that have poor soil conditions.

 

Drought Lawn Care

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In Fort Worth we like manicured green lawns. How do you manage drought lawn care during a Texas drought and with water restrictions are in place? Some homeowners have sprinkler systems, but many don’t. But proper watering is only part of the formula for success. With or without a sprinkler system there are several other things that we can do to have healthy lawns that don’t stress too much in a drought. First step is planning. Most of the work needs to be done before your lawn gets stressed out. We spend a lot of money taking care of our yards. Here are some tips on when and how to spend your money to have a lawn that will best withstand drought conditions.

Drought Lawn Care

Keeping grass green has more to do with how it’s maintained before the drought hits than how often it’s watered during lean times. Lawns are able to survive long ¬periods without water — often they will turn brown and go dormant, but after the drought lifts, they’ll bounce back in a few weeks.

Change Your Mowing Habits

The good news is that there are steps you can take before the brown sets in, including making small changes to the way you mow. Raise the lawn mower blade so you remove only the top third of each blade and keep the grass taller (at about 3 inches or 7 centimeters). This gives the roots increased shade and more shade means less evaporation. Mulching also helps a lawn retain moisture; the simplest way to mulch is to leave grass clippings on the lawn after mowing. This may require mowing a little more often to avoid piles of mulch.

Planning Ahead

Although it’s a good place to start, keeping grass green during a drought takes more than adjusting how you mow. Fertilizing properly in the spring and fall help build a healthy root system which is essential in keeping your lawn health. Lawns do not need to be watered as much in the winter as they go dormant. But, if the drought continues through the winter then the lawn should be watered occasionally.
Keeping the lawn green, mowed and maintained is good for more than your homes aesthetics — turfgrasses are good for the environment because they release oxygen while trapping dust, dirt and polluting gasses such as carbon dioxide, hydrogen fluoride and perosyacetyle nitrate. They’re also responsible for water filtration, and they help reduce erosion and runoff.

The next time your experience a Texas drought you will now know more about drought lawn care.

lawn maintenanceMaintaining lawn during drought

Summertime lawn maintenance tips for Texas homeowners

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You know they say that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence,  but this summer, why not keep the grass greener on your side of the fence? Summer brings about warm weather and longer days which is great for outdoor activities. However, the warm days of summer can have a significant impact on your lawn. These few, quick tips could help you keep your lawn healthy all summer.

 

 

How often do you need to water?

One of the biggest issues your lawn might face during the summer is the drought. To keep your lawn healthy and green, you need to water it frequently. Generally lawns need at least one inch of water per week to stay in good shape.

Here is what you should do:

  • Water deeply and leave a reasonable time interval to allow the grass to develop drought-resistant roots. Be careful though! Some homeowners wait till the lawn gets brown and dormant and then try to water it back to life. This does not help! If you are not able to water your lawn regularly during summer, you can just leave it. Usually the lawn recovers when the weather changes.
  • Water your lawn during less warm hours preferably early in the morning. This allows the soil to absorb all the water and the all the moisture.

How often should you mow your lawn during summer?Health lawn

To allow your grass to develop deeper roots, you should set your mower’s blades as high as possible. Taller grass is more drought-resistant and helps provide shade for the surrounding soil to maintain moisture for longer periods.

You should keep your mower blades sharp to avoid tearing and beating the grass and reducing stress during warm temperatures.

Weeding:

During summer most weeds bloom and disperse their seeds. It is vital to remove the weeds before they bloom to avoid dealing them in the next season. The good news is that it’s easier to fight weeds during summer than in colder weather.

Additional tips:

  • Did you know that you can use a small straight-sided can to gauge the amount of water that received during irrigation?
  • The best time of the year to fertilize your grass is at the beginning of spring and at the end of the fall.
  • Applying products like fertilizers and herbicides during summer can damage your grass, contact your local landscaper before attempting to apply any products on your lawn during summer.

If you would like more tips about how to take care of your lawn during this summer for your specific location check out our blog give us a call at 817 457 7507.

What is Scalping anyway??

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drought lawn care

Scalping is not beneficial for all grass types. It is mainly intended for Bermuda and St. Augustine grass here in the south. The term, “scalping”, simply means mowing your grass on the lowest setting on your lawn mower. Cutting the lawn down low allows the warmth of the sun to raise the soil temp and encourage new growth. Scalping also helps remove any thatch, or dry dormant grass, that could be holding too much moisture which may eventually lead to various lawn diseases later on in the spring. Just be careful when planning to scalp that there are no more cold fronts or freezes headed your way, as scalping too soon may have adverse effects on your lawn.