Week 2 Water

The water status of the soil is measured by Watermark sensors in units of suction i.e. how hard it is for the plant to suck water out of the soil. It’s easy for the plant to get water out of the wet soil demarcated by the green zone, harder in the orange zone and by the time we hit the red zone the plant will be suffering a bit. I am just measuring one depth (averaging two sensors) because this is about the middle of the root zone (our soil has a lot of clay in it below 40 cm and the roots of annual crops find it difficult to grow much deeper than 60 cm). The soil became very wet after the Christmas rain, and then dried out a little last week.