Also, make sure to check out your lawn. Are there any regular standing puddles of water that appear during or after watering? You can aerate your lawn to disperse the puddles—that might be the source of excess moisture that moss likes best. Take a look as well at how shady your yard is. Waiting between watering days ensures that the soil has enough time to dry out.
This less frequent watering also helps promote strong root growth for trees, which will keep them robust. A mature tree will need an inch of water per week.
Make sure to note, though, that for older, more-established trees, watering only in this area could encourage disease and rotting. Instead, move farther out, past the canopy of the tree to the drip line, or where rain would drip off the leaves.
Water until you start to see runoff; this means the soil is saturated. The water in the soil displaces the air, and a tree has to breathe too.
And, of course, our experts are here to serve you! But is it true that moss always grows on the north side of trees? Mosses need water to survive and reproduce, so you'll find them in damper areas. Which side of the tree moss tends to grow on depends where you are in the world. Here in the UK, this is the side of the trees that gets the least sunlight. In the southern hemisphere, this is the south side of trees.
Moss has been used as a natural compass around the world, but beware! For instance, the direction of prevailing wind and rain can influence where moss grows.
The bottom line is, mosses need water to survive and there are a couple of reasons for this. If a tree bark is deeply grooved with shaded crevices, moss can thrive there too. Moss will also grow on tree roots, close to the woodland floor.
But trees offer other benefits to help mosses colonise and flourish. Tree bark is rough and irregular, and these cracks and crevices provide protected micro habitats. And the steep trunks of trees are relatively competition-free too. In fact, mosses and other plants and lichens that grow on and around trees are an important part of biodiversity.
It is pretty simple to picture why this is the north side of trees here and the south side of trees in Australia for example. The sun's rays strike the earth's surface nearly perpendicular close to the equator. As you move away from the tropics, the suns rays intersect the earth at an angle. Here in Santa Barbara, California, the sun is not directly overhead, but to the south, so the south side of any object will get more sunlight than the north.
This is why moss likes the north side of trees. The fuzzy texture and shade-loving characteristics of moss are in part due to it being a non-vascular plant.
Mosses belong to a group of plants called Bryophytes. These plants do not have roots, or the xylem and phloem of vascular plants, but rather have rhizomes that hold the moss in place and collect water and nutrients the moss requires.
The "fuzzy" texture you mention helps to keep the plant from drying out and also helps diffuse the light used for photosynthesis. Good question! Also, that rule only applies in the northern hemisphere --in the southern hemisphere, moss mostly grows on the south sides of trees. The reason is that in the northern hemisphere, because of the tilt of the Earth on its axis, the sun almost always appears to be a little south of directly overhead.
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