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🎥 Dry conditions require some watering of trees, shrubs

Fall-planted trees

By BECKY KISER
Hays Post

With temperatures forecasted to warm up later this week, you may want to take advantage of the increased heat and sun to water some of your landscape plantings.

“We are very dry right now, despite some of the very minimal snow amounts we’ve received,” said Holly Dickman, the city of Hays’ Water Conservation Specialist.

“If you have new trees or shrubs in the landscape, it is advisable to go ahead and water them,” Dickman said. “But don’t do it when it’s severely cold. Wait until we have a nice stretch of warm days. A week or so ago, we were in the 60s for a day or two. That’s a perfect time to get out and soak those trees and shrubs deeply, giving them something.

“We just haven’t had any moisture. It’s important to keep those things healthy going through the winter months. A healthy plant is a more water-efficient plant in the future,” she pointed out.

If the temperature falls overnight, Dickman said “it won’t hurt anything.”

“The main thing is you don’t want to be out there watering when the ground is completely frozen. For us around here, our weather fluctuates so much, to have truly frozen ground is pretty uncommon.

“So if we get some temperatures that warm up into the 50s or the 60s, the soil also warms up if it’s sunny, and the water will soak in.”

According to official statistics from the K-State Agricultural Research Center, Hays has had 0.12 inches of moisture in January, coming from one inch of snow. So far for the snow season, only 3.1 inches of snow has fallen in Hays.

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