There has to be a scientific way to precisely water tomatoes in the desert without wasting water, because this is just too frustrating.
I have my tomatoes planted in containers so the surrounding earth doesn’t pull away much needed water. The problem that I'm having is watering consistently without over watering. Before the drought I just watered with soaked hoses with lots of Soil Amendments to increase drainage, but now I can’t waste water.
So now I want to water enough to uniformly wet every inch of soil and provide enough drainage as to not soak it. I'm told to use trays under the container with stands so the water will drain, but also allow the water to remain in the tray to wick back up as the soil dries.
A couple of other problems are to prevent mosquitoes from growing in the tray and also capturing any excess water overflowing the tray to be reused. I'm thinking about using screen or maybe mosquito netting around the container for the mosquitoes and a deep tray maybe a larger container with a single drain pipe to capture the excess water into a closed container so I don't have to worry about over watering. I would rather just dump in a large amount of water and not have to worry about under watering as long as I can recover the excess.
Anyway I just wanted to throw some ideas out there to see what others have to say about it.