Since the summer watering season is over in October, it's time to adjust our sprinklers I used a 5-day watering schedule for the summer. I added a link to the TexasWeather Home Water Recomendations web page. You can use it to calculate the water requirments of your lawn for a given time period.

Circle C Landscape recommends using the PET (Potential Evapotranspiriation) values to better estimate the water needs of our turf grass this time of year. As you all know, we don't have a lot of topsoil.

''Potential Evapotranspiration (PET) is an estimate of the water requirements of a 4-inch grass growing in a deep soil under well-watered conditions.''

Okay, we don't have deep soil, but we can get an idea. The only trick is to determine what your sprinkler precipitation rate is. To do that, you put out cans around your yard (coffee, tuna, cat food, etc.) and measure the inches of water they collect for a given time period. You can then calculate an in/hr value. That is what you need to plug into the web page to estimate your water requirements.

I know, this is sort of complicated, but for those interested, the resources are provided by Texas A&M and the State Cooperative Extension service.