Ensuring your garden gets the correct amount of water is essential during the hot summer weather. Water is crucial for the development, taste, and quality of the fruit produced by a plant. Believe it or not, a vegetable garden needs to receive 1 inch of water per week. An inch of water ensures there is enough water to penetrate the soil down to the roots.

Providing a garden with the proper amount of water is important because too much or too little water can affect plant health and productivity. Watering too much decreases the nutrients in the soil, leaves the roots too saturated, and causes fruits to be bland and tasteless. Not watering enough dries plants out and they become withered; additionally, the fruit will not be able to increase in size because water is the main component that gives a fruit its size, shape, and taste.

In order to keep track of the amount of water your vegetable garden receives, a rain gauge would be a useful tool. A rain gauge measures the amount of rain water received and this information can be used to determine how much watering must be done personally. For example, in a 100 square-foot garden, 62 gallons of water would be one inch of water. If the rain gauge reads half an inch of water following a storm, the garden still needs 31 gallons of water for that week to have the complete inch of water needed.

A way to test if your garden needs water is to dig 2 inches down into the soil and see if the soil has any moisture. If the soil 2 inches below the surface is dry, the garden needs to be watered. The key to cultivating a healthy and productive garden all depends on how the garden is watered.