 Hi this is Mary Kaye, we're at backbone valley nursery in Marble Falls, Texas and this is Ask the Experts. I try to cover things each week that I hear the most about during the week and coming up into this hot weather we're going to be hearing a lot about why are my plants wilted? Why are they dying? And one of the most common things is they're being watered appropriately. So I'm going to go over a few tips that'll keep your plants healthy. Things you may not have thought of and show you why it's so important to water in certain ways. We have plants that go dry and there are components of the soil that have lignans in them. Lignans will repel water when dry but then they'll so come up when they're saturated well enough. So many times I ask people when you water how many times do you fill the pot and they'll say well I water it until it comes out the bottom. Well that may seem like it's enough water but in reality it's not. Those lignans are repulling the water going straight through and hope that you don't have a saucer under those outside pots because if they go straight through and that water is sitting in a saucer it will be reabsorbed by the bottom of the soil. There will be anaerobic conditions in there and those roots will rot so you don't want to have a saucer outside. Lose the saucers. If it's not a patty I'll put them up on pot feet or bricks or something so that after you water you can rinse off the pool deck or the patty of surface. But we have a fig tree here that's fig trees have very very aggressive root systems. They're very fiber-street systems and they dry out very fast because they have such large leaves. You know these leaves are going to get way big. So when we water this you can see that we have what I call a lip between the top of the pot and the top of the soil. When you pot plants you always want a lip. You want to have at least a two-inch lip so that you can fill that reservoir with water over and over again and I'm going to demonstrate this and I'm going to show you what what happens. Okay we're going to fill up this reservoir and you can see it's taking that water pretty fast. See how long it takes to come out the bottom drain out drain of the pole. I can see some coming out right now. What you want to watch for are any bubbles that might come up on the surface or out the drainage holes. You can actually see down in one of these there are some bubbles coming up. This is displacing air pockets of dry soil so you know if you see bubbles coming up in your in your water and the reservoir. If you see coming out of the drainage holes that you're not done yet you need to fill it over and over again. If you have free drainage meaning no saucer you cannot apply too much water at one time. You can apply too little so it's best to air on the positive side. Fill it up again then you know that you've thoroughly watered it. The important thing is if you don't water it water it well and then you wait until it's necessary to water it again. So I'll fill this up again we'll just let it drain and drain and drain. The next plant this is a really nice for man's ear. We've talked about those one time and what we're gonna do is look at this soil because we talked about looking at the root system and a lot of times you can tell from looking at a root system you can see that's very dry right there although this is very heavy. So when you look at it it appears to be pretty dry but the the weight of it tells us that it's it's got some moisture in it. So we're gonna water this one and see if we have any bubbles come up. There we go see our bubbles right in here coming out the drainage holes right there. So we'll fill it again we know we're not done if we see bubbles coming out. There's some right here. Oh we've got them up top now. There's some bubbles so I know that until I no longer see bubbles I have not done with my water. So that was helpful to look at the soil to know that even though the pot was heavy the soil was really drier than it looked or than it felt. So I always just give it one more water after it stopped bubbling because I figured it was that dry it needs a little extra. This is another problem right here on this some of us germany that we see and sometimes pots come from the growers or even we rip off them and put the soil really really high in the pot you can see this hardly any lip there it's it's really almost level with the top of the pot. Try never to do this you need that reservoir you can see how difficult this plant is going to be to water because I'm gonna have to apply small amounts at one time and then stop and wait for it to drain out and then I'm gonna so this is gonna take me forever I'm gonna get frustrated at it and I'm gonna quit and it's gonna dry up and die. That's what happens when we're hand watering we tend to get hot and tired nine times out of 10 the last plant on the row that you're watering is gonna be the one that turns dry and and crispy because by the time you get to the end you're not gonna be feeling it as many times. So you can see I have to fill it again and again and again so this is what you absolutely don't want to see it's just now starting to come out just trickling out the bottom boy am I tired of watering this already imagine if you had a whole patio full of these here I go again got a water tomorrow and you know if you can try and water the soil not the not the leaves like I was doing there you go now there's some good water coming out there I still don't think this plant is wet I'm gonna have to water it for another five minutes or so so you can see what kind of time you're gonna save yourself by potting it correctly. Well last year I'm gonna address as a hanging basket real pretty hanging baskets people usually have a wand like this and now fill it up and they'll see that water come out the bottom and they think they're done well if you don't fill it over and over and over again and I can't hold it much longer but if you don't do it over and over and over again it's little bits at a time like that you're never gonna get it thoroughly that saturated what happens when you don't get it thoroughly saturated this happens so here we are and you can see when you have a dry plant like this watch how fast the water goes through see it's just pouring out the bottom that one hadn't even really started to to drip so when you're watering your hanging baskets go back over I know you don't like dripping water on your patios on your porch or wherever but if you go to water do a good job water well and your plants will survive and thrive this is Mary K at Beckland Valley Nursery see you next week