Water management districts set irrigation restrictions across this region and they tighten as conditions dry. Those rules limit which days you can water and often the hours, and they are worth knowing rather than guessing at.
Check the current rules
Restrictions vary by district and by county and they change with drought status, so anything written a year ago may be out of date. Your county extension office or your water management district publishes the current position.
New sod and new landscape installations frequently have a separate establishment allowance, which is worth knowing before you install anything.
Building a schedule inside them
- Water in the early morning, before sunrise where the rules allow. It minimises evaporation and the blades dry as the sun comes up, which reduces disease pressure.
- Water deeply rather than often. Fewer, longer applications train roots downward; frequent light watering keeps them at the surface.
- Use cycle and soak on clay or slope, splitting a run into shorter blocks so water soaks in rather than running off.
- Adjust seasonally. A schedule set in April is wrong by January, and a controller set once and forgotten is the most common irrigation fault there is.
- Turn it off in the wet season when it is not needed. Running irrigation through a rainy stretch is both wasteful and actively harmful.
Know how much you are actually applying
Most people have no idea. Put straight-sided containers out across a zone, run it for a set time, and measure. That tells you both how much you are applying and whether the zone is even.
It is also the only way to know whether a run time is producing the depth of watering a lawn actually wants.
Rain sensors
A functioning rain shutoff device is required on automatic systems in Florida, and a great many have failed without anybody noticing. Trigger yours by hand and confirm a zone will not start. It takes five minutes and it is worth doing annually.
Evening watering
It is the worst option here regardless of what the rules allow. A lawn that stays wet through a warm humid night is exactly the condition large patch and brown patch need, and disease pressure in this climate is high enough already.
If you want a straight answer about what your yard actually needs, get in touch. We are based in Monticello and cover Jefferson, Leon and Madison counties plus the South Georgia line.