An approach to irrigation scheduling for chinese caggage is presented, and a crop yield response function to soil moisure is derived from irrigation experiments, based on a root- zone water balance method. The paper concludes that crop yield can be estimated by allowable depletion and actual evapotranspiration in 3 cropping stages, and presents the optimal allowalbe depletion, irriga- tion frequency and the amount of irrigation water to get the maximum crop yield and opti- mal irrigation policy.