Keeping your garden and pool alive while you're away for summer

Why summer travel is the riskiest time to leave#

A Dubai garden in June, July or August depends on its irrigation system running exactly as intended, every day, with no room for error — a stuck valve or a dead controller battery that would be a minor annoyance in December can stress establishing plants and a lawn within days in August. Most of the checklist below is really about removing single points of failure before you're not around to notice them.

It also helps to be honest about which parts of the garden are actually at risk. A mature, well-established tree or shrub with deep roots is far more forgiving of a missed week than a lawn, a container plant, or anything planted in the last year or two. If time is short before a trip, put the checklist effort where it matters most — new planting, pots and lawn — rather than spreading it evenly across a garden where some parts genuinely need far less attention than others.

Two weeks before you leave#

• Test every irrigation zone manually and watch it run start to finish — don't just trust the schedule shown on the controller screen.
• Check emitters and sprinkler heads for blockages, and look for any wet or dry patches that shouldn't be there.
• If you're changing the watering schedule for the trip, make the change now and watch how the garden responds for a week before you go, not the night before.

The week before#

1. 1

   Deep-water everything once

   A thorough soak a few days before departure builds a buffer of moisture in the root zone that a slightly-off irrigation schedule can draw on.

2. 2

   Top up mulch to 5–7 cm

   Fresh mulch on beds and around trees slows evaporation and keeps roots cooler while no one's adjusting anything by eye.

3. 3

   Move vulnerable pots into shade

   Container plants dry out far faster than anything in open ground — group them together out of direct afternoon sun, ideally on a drip line rather than left for hand-watering.

4. 4

   Raise the mower height on your last cut

   A slightly longer lawn shades its own root zone and copes with a missed watering far better than one cut short.

5. 5

   Have someone check in, even briefly

   A neighbour, building security or a scheduled maintenance visit partway through the trip catches problems — a tripped breaker, a blocked filter — while there's still time to fix them.

Pool care while you're away#

A pool left completely unattended for two or three weeks in summer heat is a common way to come home to a green pool. Chlorine dosing, pump run-time and filter backwashing all need to keep happening on schedule — automated dosing and a timer on the pump help, but neither replaces an occasional physical check, since Dubai's heat and dust load a pool faster than most systems are set up to handle unattended for weeks at a time.

Evaporation is worth planning for too: a Dubai pool can lose a noticeable amount of water depth over a hot, windy week, and a water level that drops below the skimmer line can run a pump dry and damage it. If no one is checking the pool in person, an auto-fill or top-up arrangement — or at minimum, a clear instruction to whoever is checking in on the water level — avoids coming home to a damaged pump on top of everything else.

How the plan changes with trip length#

Smart controllers and remote checks#

A Wi-Fi-connected irrigation controller that sends an alert if a zone fails to run, or that can be checked and adjusted from a phone, removes a lot of the uncertainty of a long trip — you don't have to trust that a fixed schedule set two weeks ago is still the right one if the weather changes while you're away. It's not a substitute for an in-person check on a long trip, since it can't see a burst pipe or a blocked filter, but paired with a mid-trip visit it covers most of what tends to go wrong.

What can wait until you're back#

Not everything needs doing before a trip. Pruning, feeding and any new planting are all better left until you're back and can monitor the result — feeding especially, since fertiliser applied right before an unmonitored irrigation gap can do more harm than good if watering doesn't go exactly to plan.

Coming home#

• Walk the whole garden before unpacking — it's the easiest time to spot a failed zone or a struggling pot while it's still fixable.
• Check the pool's chemical balance properly rather than trusting it looks clear; a pool can look fine and still be out of balance after weeks of unattended dosing.
• Deep-water anything that looks stressed rather than resuming the normal schedule immediately — a recovery soak helps more than jumping straight back to routine watering.
• Reset any temporary "holiday" schedule back to the normal seasonal one, so the garden isn't over- or under-watered for the following month.