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Gardening is a great way to keep yourself healthy. By indulging in such a hobby, you can relax and eliminate stress. Also, having green plants around your home helps to ensure you breathe clean air. Furthermore, vegetables and fruits from your garden can feed your family and ensure you eat healthily.
Some of its benefits include fighting sicknesses and diseases, strengthening your muscles, improving your memory and so on. Gardening is not just about planting flowers and crops, you have to ensure that you take care of your plants. This includes tilling, weeding applying nutrients and fertilizers where necessary and of course, watering them.
Of all the things you have to do to ensure good plant growth, watering them is one of the most important. This helps them to grow by transporting essential nutrients from the soil and through the plant. A lack of it in plant cells will make them droop and will affect their growth. You can find ways to keep your garden plants healthy here.
Challenges to Watering Garden Plants
While water may be available most times, it is not all kinds that are suitable for plants. A case in point is a public supply. Typically local authorities add chemicals like chlorine into it. While this is good enough for human consumption, it is not for plants.
This is because chlorine kills microorganisms like fungi and bacteria as well as insects that aid pollination. The issue is some of these microorganisms are useful for plant growth so when you use chlorinated water, they die.
Water is divided into two forms. These are hard and soft. Soft water contains low levels of salts and bicarbonates but hard water contains large amounts of them. It also permits the buildup of scale and stains on different surfaces.
When it is used for watering plants, it causes a layer of calcium carbonate and salt to buildup on the soil and plant roots. This does not bode well for plant growth.
Other issues that can affect the water you use for your plants are contaminants like heavy metals such as arsenic and lead. This can be a result of rust in pipes. Chemicals like BPA may also be released into it when a garden is exposed to the sun.
Contaminants can also come from factory wastes or fertilizer runoff. All of these contaminants negatively impacts plant growth. You can read more about this here https://blog.1000bulbs.com/home/how-water-quality-affects-your-plants.
To ensure that what you use is good enough for your plant, you have to remove the contaminants in it. You do this by attaching a filter to your garden hose.
What Are Garden Hose Filters and How Do They Work?
Filters are devices that are used to remove impurities such as chemicals and heavy metals from water. In other words, they make hard water softer. There are various types of filters and they all perform similar functions in different ways depending on where and why they are used.
One of these is a garden hose filter. These are specifically designed to help eliminate contaminants from water to be used for garden plants. Remember that chlorine is not harmful to humans but it is to plants. Therefore, a filter used in a home will not remove chlorine but microorganisms and other contaminants.
A garden hose filter will remove chlorine but leave microorganisms. Even if it removes microorganisms, it does not kill those that are already in the soil like chlorinated water will do. Thus, a garden hose filter helps to encourage the right ecosystem for plant growth.
A standard hose filter is around 10” to 12” in diameter and about 6 feet long. However, the size of the filter you will need is dependent on the amount of water you require in your garden.
Garden hose filters are compact and make use of different filtration techniques. They often come with both male as well as female ends and are attached to a garden hose. When water passes through them, they prevent or remove rust and scales. They do this by slowing the oxidation process.
Asides from this, they reduce or eliminate the different contaminants that may be present. These can include chemicals like chlorine, ammonia, lead, and so on. They also help to soften the water so that is safe and healthy for garden plants.
Choosing a Garden Hose Filter
Different hose filters are made using different technologies. The best one to choose often is typically dependent on what you need it for or what you intend to achieve. When using your water strictly for plants, it is best to use a filter that reduces or removes chlorine and chloramines.
At times, you may need the water for other purposes asides from watering your plants. If you will be drinking it or giving it to pets you may choose a garden hose hard water filter that removes all forms of contaminants and microorganisms.
What this does effectively is that you have removed microbes that are harmful to humans and animals. You have also removed chlorine that is harmful to plants and this will ensure that microbes in the soil do not die. This means that the soil remains fertile with the needed nutrients for plant growth.
Different filters can as well supply different quantity of water per time. While some can supply up to 100,000 gallons, some are only able to supply between 1,000 to 10,000 gallons. This means that if you will be needing a lot, you should choose one with a higher capacity.
Conclusion
Watering your plants with hard water such as one that contains contaminants like chloramines and heavy metals is detrimental to their growth. Asides from adding too many bicarbonates and salts to the soil, it also kills beneficial microorganisms.
To remove these contaminants, you should simply install a suitable filter on your garden hose. Depending on the intended uses of the water, choose a filter that suits this purpose. This can mean if you need it for household use or strictly using it for your plants.
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