You how it goes sometimes: You research a do-it-yourself topic like drip irrigation on the internet, it seems doable, so you ask some friends for advice, then buy a bunch of stuff and try and put it together …. Only to find all the little problems nobody told you about?
Well, this is not one of those stories. It’s more like:
Once upon a time a person with no experience in the field did some research, planned a drip irrigation system, bought parts, and installed it. Everything worked precisely as planned, the first time.
Sure, something could always go south later, but I can at least attest this was far easier than I’d feared. Instead of a post to pass on all the tripping points I found, it’ll be a description of how it was done.
Our drip irrigation project – first the why
We have several small garden patches. Hose watering them is 1) not fun 2) expensive in money and resources (purifying the water and shipping it from a couple of counties away), and 3) wouldn’t be available if city water isn’t available.
Last year we got three rain barrels of about 60 gal each set up to catch water from the gutters of the roof of the house and a shed. This solved problems 2) and 3) but not 1). Drip irrigation can be turned on and left to do its thing, and requires much less water and does a better job than intermittent soaking from a hose.
The first step (after reading enough to get some clue) was to head to the back yard with a measuring tape and sketch book. I measured distances and checked elevations of each garden patch relative to the barrels.
That let me plan which patches would be served by which barrels (I cleverly used the barrel uphill of each plot!) and what connectors and hose lengths would be needed. Then I could order the hose adapters, transport hose, drip hose, and various connectors.
Assembly? Not a problem.
Assembly was straightforward. I’d anticipated several problem points: Will the water move to the end of the hose even if it has to rise and fall as it goes over barriers of a raised bed garden? Yes. If you have two drip lines running off of one transfer hose, will both the down and uphill drip lines get similar flow? Yes. If the drip line hose is long (20 ft), will the drip rates at the beginning and end of the hose be similar? Yes. If you run a drip line for one garden as a side split, then run the transfer hose further to a second drip line in a second garden, will both drip lines get good feed? Yes.
One of the beds fed by a rain barrel filled off of a long storage shed – the white debris is shredded paper mulch
Dripper dripping… I guess that’s why it’s called drip irrigation.
Well, that went pretty well…
In short, this is one project Very worth doing. It’s very workable for a naive user to not only do it, but make a plan and buy individual parts rather than a kit. Kits were twice as expensive and less suited to our needs. It’s also very handy to have outlets at multiple heights on your rain barrels so you can open the lines and let them run half the volume of a barrel without having to pay attention to them. I forget what we paid for the rain barrels last year, but the drip irrigation parts came in at $70 to serve three barrels, one 20×4 ft garden, one 12×4 ft garden, two 4×4, and several perennials (trees and a strawberry/asparagus patch).
A year later, here’s some further information…
I put this system together last year (this article contains some previously posted material which this now supersedes) and I am pleased to report that the system worked very well all year long. A few additional things I learned:
- The cheap little tent-stake like garden pegs help to keep the hose where you want it while the plants are young and tender enough to be damaged if the hose moved around.
- When one arm of a split doesn’t need watering (such as my strawberries and asparagus in late summer), that dripper hose can be coiled up and hung above the gravity feed level.
- It’s worth it to be careful about not leaving a gap in the fencing where the irrigation lines come in. Those blasted rabbits Will find the gap, climb in, be unable to get back out, and hang out eating all your stuff until you find them. (and being in town, I couldn’t even shoot the blighter once I found it)
- Burying the hose probably works: the section running through the bottom of my potato bin apparently did. I can’t tell how much water the taters got from it, but the farther end of the drip line kept dripping. We didn’t want to bury much though; I prefer to be able to check that I’m still dripping.
The multiple spigots in the rain barrels worked especially well, enabling us to choose which water level we wanted to irrigate down to, place the hose on that spigot, open it up and just walk away.
Pro Tip:
Don’t forget to close your spigots back up after you have used them, or you will just drain your barrels unintentionally.