Tuesday, May 9, 2000
Volunteer auditing program
puts ease in efficient watering
By Jerry Daniel Reed
Reporter-News Staff Writer
Jan Voelter will know next time how best
to irrigate the grounds of her home.
Monday afternoon, the secretary of Big Country
Master Gardeners volunteered her home for hands-on training in
an irrigation audit course presented by Texas A&M University’s
Extension Service. County Agent Gary Bomar said the course was
to train volunteer master gardeners to perform irrigation audits
by request for area homeowners.
Bomar hopes to have the audit program up
and going quickly. Homeowners may be charged a small fee to cover
the transportation costs of the volunteer auditors.
The audit in Voelter’s yard was typical.
It found a few clogged sprinkler heads, a wide disparity in the
watering efficiency at different spots in the lawn, and two different
types of sprinkler heads in use.
The good news is that some repair and reprogramming
of the controls will enable the Voelters’ sprinkler system
to operate considerably more efficiently.
Master Gardener volunteers helped extension
turf specialist Gene Taylor and colleague Jim McAfee run their
test irrigation in the six zones of the Voelter home: two in front,
one on the side and three in the spacious back yard. Conical cups
were spotted in each test to see where the most and the least
sprinkler water would fall, and how much to expect to catch in
an hour’s time.
With a laptop computer and software developed
at A&M, Taylor calculated how often the Voelters should water
in a normal year — which he acknowledged is useless well
into the third year of a major drought.
The software is based on once-a-week watering,
which is twice as often as allowed under the current stage of
the city’s water use restrictions.
But the program’s main point of the
program is to encourage people to practice conservation during
normal times, he said.
Texans tend 2.2 million acres of residential
lawns and 94 percent of homeowners irrigate, he said.
With the state’s population projected
to double in 50 years, more efficient watering is essential if
Texans continue to maintain lawns and landscapes, Taylor said.
Old mindsets must give way to a focus on
conservation, he said.
“They have this mentality: If it’s
green and it’s wet, it’s good,’’ he said.
But over-watering can damage the health of plants while costing
the homeowner extra cash, he said.
The extension team and Master Gardeners
are scheduled to do an irrigation audit this morning at McMurry
University’s Indian Stadium. City water officials require
the audits as a condition of allowing athletic fields to be watered
weekly instead of every two weeks, Bomar said.
Contact staff writer Jerry Reed at 676-6769
or reedj@abinews.com.
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Copyright ©2000,
Abilene Reporter-News / Texnews / E.W. Scripps Publications
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