DFW Seasonal Watering Schedule: Spring to Winter

Here's how I actually water Dallas-Fort Worth lawns. I'm Brandon Surratt — TCEQ Licensed Irrigator (LI0023963) and a Certified Landscape Irrigation Auditor through Texas A&M AgriLife. I run Better Earth Solutions and I'm on residential irrigation systems across DFW every week. The schedules below are what I program when a customer hands me their controller, not what's printed in a manual.

What you'll learn:

• The spring start-up I actually run (it starts at the door, not the controller)
• Real summer runtimes — about an inch of water a week, broken into short cycles
• Why rotors need roughly twice the runtime of sprays
• How cycle-and-soak works on Rachio versus a dumb controller
• The fall taper, plus the December exception nobody talks about
• Real DFW winter care — no compressed-air blowouts
• The biggest mistake I see on every other property: watering too often
• Why a "healthy looking" lawn can have no root structure at all

Spring Start-Up: How I Actually Do It

Spring start-up isn't flipping the controller on. It's a sit-down inspection that takes 30+ minutes if I do it right. Here's the actual procedure when I arrive at a residential property.

1. Knock on the door

First thing. Introduce myself, ask to talk to the homeowner. The most important question I ask: is there anything that stands out to you, anything you've been having issues with? Half the time they tell me about a brown patch or a wet spot or a head that's been broken for months — information I'd otherwise spend 20 minutes finding on my own.

2. Walk back to the clock and start documenting

Before I run anything I want to know what I'm working with:

• Static pressure at the house. This sets expectations. If static is high, I already know to look for misting and overpressure damage. If it's low, I know the system is going to have weak throw and I won't waste time chasing it as a separate problem.
• Backflow condition. Cracks, weeping, valve handles that won't seat, missing test cocks, signs of freeze damage from the prior winter.
• Pictures of the controller. What model, what programs are set, what the current schedule looks like. I should be documenting the current schedule before changing anything — that's a habit I'm still building. If you're auditing your own system, do the same.

3. Run every zone manually

Walk the yard with the controller in manual mode and watch each zone do its thing. What I'm looking at:

• Clogged nozzles
• Nozzles turned the wrong direction
• Leaking heads
• Broken pipes
• Wet spots (when zones are off — that means a leak)
• Poor coverage (dry rings between heads)
• Excessive coverage (overlap to the point of waste, water hitting the street)
• Signs of algae — usually means standing water from a leak or chronic overspray
• Misting from overpressure (which I'd already half-expect from the static pressure reading in step 2)

That's the real spring start-up. Now we can talk about runtime.

Summer Runtime — Real Numbers

Target is about an inch of water a week on an established DFW lawn during peak summer. Here's how that translates on a typical residential system.

Spray zones

Roughly 28 minutes per zone per week, split across two watering days. The way I program it:

• Two watering days per week (matching NTMWD assigned days for most cities)
• Each watering day: two 7-minute cycles with a soak between them
• That's 4 short cycles per zone per week, 28 minutes total

You could think of it as half an hour broken into pieces. Less than 25 min/wk is usually too little for peak summer. Much more than 28-30 min/wk is usually too much.

Rotor zones

Rotors put out a lot less water than sprays — closer to 0.5 inches per hour versus around 1.5 in/hr for sprays. So rotors need to run about twice as long as sprays on the same lawn to deliver the same depth. They're slightly more efficient than sprays in practice (less drift, less mist, less direct evaporation), which is why it's roughly 2x and not 3x even though the precipitation rate math suggests otherwise.

Same twice-weekly schedule, same cycle-and-soak structure — just longer cycles.

Drip zones

Drip is its own thing. The emission rate is so slow that runoff isn't really a concern, and drip is exempt from a lot of city time-of-day restrictions (check your specific city). Run it long enough to soak the root zone of whatever you're irrigating — typically 30-45 minutes per session for foundation drip and tree rings, once or twice a week.

Why Frequency Matters More Than Volume

This is the most important section in this article. If you read nothing else, read this.

Most homeowners don't overwater by adding too many minutes per cycle. They overwater by watering too often. Three or four days a week instead of two. A daily 10-minute "light watering." Running every other day "to keep things green."

It looks like care. It's actually killing the lawn.

Roots grow toward water. When you water frequently and shallowly, the roots stay near the surface because that's where the water is. They never get the signal to push deep. The grass might look fine on the surface — green, full, maybe even thick. But the entire system is fragile.

I'll walk a lawn that looks healthy from the curb. I'll dig a small section to check on something else. The grass falls apart in my hand. No root structure. The dirt has nothing holding it together. One hot week without irrigation and that whole lawn would brown out in a way you couldn't recover from quickly. A hard rain and the soil itself starts moving.

That's what frequent shallow watering builds.

The fix is the opposite of what feels intuitive: water less often, but deeper. Two days a week, multiple short cycles per day with soaks between them so the water actually penetrates instead of running off. The grass roots chase that deeper water and build the structure that holds the lawn together.

Twice-weekly cycle-and-soak isn't just about meeting city restrictions. It's how you grow real roots.

Cycle-and-Soak Setup

The whole point of cycle-and-soak is letting water absorb between cycles instead of running it long enough to puddle and run off. On Houston Black clay this matters enormously — single long cycles waste half the water to runoff.

Smart controllers (Rachio is the one I install most)

You actually don't tell Rachio "cycle and soak" directly. You tell it your slope and your soil type. If you set Soil = Clay and Slope = Moderate or High, Rachio will limit how long it runs at one time on its own. The cycles and soak intervals are calculated from those inputs.

That's why a properly set up Rachio doesn't need much hand-holding. The mistake I see is homeowners setting Soil = Loam (the default) when they're actually on Houston Black clay — Rachio then runs longer single cycles than it should and the homeowner thinks "smart controller doesn't work."

Dumb controllers (Hunter X-Core, older Rain Bird, builder-grade)

No native cycle-and-soak. You build it manually with multiple program start times in one day.

If you want 15 total minutes on a zone, set three start times spaced out — say 4:00 AM, 5:30 AM, 7:00 AM — at 5 minutes per cycle. Three cycles, three soak periods between them, same total runtime as one 15-minute run but it actually absorbs.

It's clunky to set up but it works. If you have a dumb controller and you're running single long cycles, you're wasting water no matter how many minutes you program.

Fall and the December Exception

July and August are peak. That's where the 28 min/wk spray runtimes apply. Then it tapers:

• September: drop a little. Cooler nights, shorter days, less evaporation
• October: drop more
• November: almost not watering — most weeks the rain handles it

But there's an exception nobody talks about: December dry spells. We get weeks in December where it's 80°F and dry. If you have winter rye grass or any cool-season grass you overseeded, that grass is actively growing and it needs water during those weeks.

You handle that two ways:

1. Smart controller: Rachio or Hydrawise will read the weather and resume watering on its own when conditions warrant. This is the strongest argument for a smart controller in DFW — it catches the December exception without you thinking about it.
2. Manual run: If you're on a dumb controller, you need to actually go out and run a manual cycle when you notice dry conditions in December. Most people don't, which is why their winter rye thins out.

Winter Care: No Blowouts in DFW

This is a regional thing that gets confused all the time. DFW does not need compressed-air blowouts. That's a northern climate service for systems where the frost line drops below buried PVC. Our frost line is too shallow.

What actually needs winter attention depends on what type of backflow you have:

• Above-ground brass backflow (common on residential), RPZ assemblies, or pressure vacuum breakers (older installs): these need to be drained, wrapped, and covered. The body sits exposed to air. Water inside the body freezes, expands, cracks the brass. A foam cover plus insulation on the exposed pipes is usually enough.
• Underground / below-grade backflows: nothing special needed.
• Underground PVC throughout the rest of the system: also nothing special. It doesn't freeze at depth in DFW.

Then two more things:

• Turn the controller off for the dormant months, OR
• Make sure your rain-freeze sensor is working. A working rain-freeze sensor will skip cycles automatically when temps drop, and you can leave the controller on for the December exception case above. Without one, leaving the controller on can mean watering on a 28°F night and creating an ice rink.

That's the whole DFW winterization. Don't pay for a blowout service.

St. Augustine vs Bermuda

Bermuda handles drought far better than St. Augustine. Bermuda will go dormant in heat and come back. St. Augustine is more sensitive and needs more consistent moisture to stay healthy.

Working estimate: St. Augustine probably needs about 20% more water than Bermuda in the same conditions. So if Bermuda is happy on 22-23 minutes a week of spray time, the equivalent St. Aug zone wants 28 minutes.

Honest caveat: I don't have controlled data to back that 20% number up. It's a field estimate from years of working DFW lawns of both grass types. Treat it as a starting point and adjust based on what your specific lawn shows you.

Zoysia sits between the two — closer to Bermuda for drought tolerance.

The Biggest Mistake

Overwatering. Especially in spring.

Spring is when homeowners turn the system on, see the grass green up, and then keep watering aggressively because everything looks like it's working. The grass is greening up because of natural seasonal warmth and longer days, not because of the extra water. The extra water is building shallow roots that fail in July.

The other side of the same problem: in winter, people are afraid to touch the controller. They'll leave a summer schedule running into November because they don't want to break anything by changing it. So the lawn gets watered while it's dormant, which doesn't help it grow (it can't) and does feed cool-weather fungal disease.

Both of those are the same root problem: not watching what the lawn actually needs and adjusting.

Drought Restrictions and the One-Day-Per-Week Rule

When NTMWD goes to Stage 2+ and most cities drop to once-weekly outdoor watering, you have to make every minute count.

On a one-day-a-week limit:

• Use the full allotted time
• Cycle-and-soak hard — multiple short cycles with long soaks so water actually absorbs instead of running off
• One long single cycle wastes the day

The bigger point: most homeowners shouldn't be watering more than two days a week even when they're allowed to. A lot of people water three or four days a week year-round. Restrictions just force them down to what they should already be doing. If you're already on a twice-weekly cycle-and-soak schedule, drought restrictions barely change what you do.

City-Specific Notes

The honest truth: Heath is the only DFW city that's really strict about water. Active monitoring, ticketing, escalating fines.

Most other NTMWD member cities (Plano, Allen, Frisco, Richardson, Garland, Wylie, Murphy, McKinney, etc.) follow the same twice-weekly assigned-day framework, but enforcement varies. Stage 2+ drought tightens enforcement everywhere.

Always check your specific city's code enforcement page for your assigned watering days.

When to Actually Water

You'll hear "water when you can see your footprints in the grass after walking on it." That's the textbook turgor-pressure rule.

I think you should water long before that. By the time the grass shows that level of stress, it's already losing root mass.

And another thing the footprints rule misses: we have more than just the grass to worry about. In DFW your foundation needs consistent soil moisture too. The same soil cracking that wastes your sprinkler water in July also pulls away from your foundation slab and causes settling. Watering a healthy lawn on a sane schedule keeps the soil around your foundation from going through the worst extremes.

There isn't a one-sentence rule. The closest I'd offer: two days a week, deep cycle-and-soak, watch what your specific lawn shows you, and don't be afraid to dig and check the roots.

If you want a watering schedule built specifically for your address, your soil, your slope, your tree cover, and your specific equipment, that's what a real spring tune-up or irrigation audit gets you. If you'd rather hire someone yourself, here's how I'd vet a contractor in DFW. Either way, call (469) 209-4110 or book online.