Watering seems like the simplest job in the garden, but it's also one of the easiest to get subtly wrong. The core principle worth learning early is that deep, infrequent watering beats frequent, shallow watering almost every time.
deep, infrequent watering beats frequent, shallow watering almost every time
When you water deeply but less often, water soaks well down into the soil, which encourages roots to grow deeper in search of it. Plants with deeper root systems cope better with dry spells and wind, and are generally more resilient overall than plants that have been trained by frequent light watering to keep their roots near the surface, where the soil dries out fastest. A quick daily sprinkle that only wets the top centimetre or two of soil does less good than it looks like it's doing.
Timing matters almost as much as quantity. Morning watering is generally the better choice over evening watering, for two main reasons. Foliage that gets wet in the evening tends to stay damp overnight, and damp leaves sitting in cool night air create exactly the conditions that fungal diseases like blight and mildew thrive in. Watering in the morning instead gives leaves the whole day to dry off. Morning watering also loses less water to evaporation than watering in the heat of the middle of the day, when a good share of what you put down simply evaporates before it reaches the roots.
Rather than watering on a fixed schedule regardless of conditions, it's worth actually checking whether the soil needs it. Push a finger a few centimetres into the soil near the base of a plant: if it's still damp down there, you can usually hold off, even if the surface looks dry. If it's dry at that depth, it's time to water properly. This simple check accounts for weather, soil type and plant size far better than watering on autopilot every second day regardless of what's actually happening underground.
Containers are a different situation entirely from an established in-ground bed, and it's worth understanding why. Pots hold a much smaller volume of soil, which dries out far faster, especially in wind or full sun, and that soil has nowhere near the buffering capacity of a full garden bed. In a New Zealand summer, containers often need watering daily, sometimes even twice a day in hot, exposed spots, where the same plant growing in the ground might go several days between waterings. Don't assume the watering routine that works for your vegetable beds will also suit your pots; check them separately and expect to water containers considerably more often.
Where you garden changes this more than most people account for. A Wellington or Manawatū section loses moisture to wind on a still-looking day the way a sheltered Waikato garden never does, while a Canterbury nor'wester can dry a bed out in an afternoon that would otherwise have gone two more days between waterings. The West Coast sits at the other extreme, with high year-round rainfall meaning overwatering, not drought, is the more realistic risk. The same finger-in-the-soil check works everywhere, but how often it turns up "time to water" depends heavily on which of these you're actually gardening in.
Watering problems compound quietly, a few dry days here, an overwatered week there, until a plant is visibly struggling. This site's premium check-ins are timed to a plant's actual growth stage, so a watering pattern that's starting to cause trouble gets flagged while it's still an easy fix, not after fruit is already splitting or leaves have dropped.