===== Watering =====
I can't provide more than a few guidelines here.
Plant needs vary based on soil, maturity, environmental conditions, etc. The only way I know to provide just the right amount of moisture is to stay in touch (be intimate) with soil and plants.
Get intimate with soil and plants.
I don't use any calendar-based metric - once a week, for example. I pay regular attention and water when necessary. With some plants too much water is as bad as too little - both can stunt a plant and reduce its production.
==== Checking moisture ====
A quick measure of soil moisture is from looking at each plant. There is a slight lack of "perkiness" when a plant is getting short of moisture. When leaves are drooping it's way past time to water (except on the hottest days here).
Next I dig a couple of inches down into the soil around a plant to see how much moisture is present. When the soil is dry at 2 1/2 to 3 inches I roll out the garden hose.
==== Water for the soil at the roots ====
Water the soil not the plant
Depending on conditions and the type of soil I may not provide additional moisture for weeks. When I do water I water thoroughly intending the moisture to feed the bottom roots of plants, encouraging them to go deeper (into the fertile soil I work to create).
==== Dry-land techniques ====
It is nice to depend on regular spring rains but often here in the Pacific Northwest we have less than 3 inches of rain from June through September. There was one year with no rainfall for a 90-day period.
Dry-land farming is the opposite of Permaculture, which is intense gardening with huge inputs, both of water and plant nutrients.
Dry-land techniques eliminate weeds, space plants further apart and include a dust mulch to break the capillary action of moisture rising to the top of the soil and evaporation.
Each root system draws from a larger area that is "all its own" so that it draws down the available moisture more slowly than if plants were intensely located.
==== Spring rains ====