Vegetable garden watering schedule assistant
Enter your bed size and this week’s weather to get a weekly watering target and a drip-irrigation runtime estimate.
Also free
This calculator's free. So is a full account.
Create a free SproutGuide account to calculate per-plant water demand from your actual plantings, tracked automatically as they grow, plus track every planting's history, harvests, and photos over time — still no cost, ever.
Create your free account →Beyond one number
A schedule per bed, per yard
This calculator gives you one target for one bed. A free SproutGuide account tracks a separate watering schedule for every bed in every yard you manage — because a shaded raised bed of lettuce and a full-sun row of tomatoes never want the same amount of water on the same day. For example:
🏡 Front Yard → Tomato BedMon · Wed · Fri — 22 min/session
🏡 Front Yard → Herb BedTue · Sat — 8 min/session
🏡 Backyard → Raised Bed 2Mon · Thu — 15 min/session
Illustrative example — sign in to see your own yards and beds.
The short version
Watering basics
- Most vegetables want roughly 1 inch of water per week, delivered in 2–3 sessions rather than daily sips
- Fruiting-stage plants (tomatoes, peppers, squash) need more water than seedlings — inconsistent watering during fruiting causes blossom-end rot and split fruit
- Deep, infrequent watering builds deeper roots than frequent shallow watering
- Subtract recent rainfall from your target — overwatering is as harmful as underwatering