You Should Install Real Drip Irrigation This Year

Drip irrigation systems make sense on several levels. Because you water exactly where you need it, you water 70% less. This is because when you water, most of what you water is the tops of the plants, which generally don’t need or benefit from it. Plants need water at the roots, which is what drip irrigation achieves.

Overhead watering has a second problem: it hits the soil, disturbing the microbes in the soil, which then get back on your plants. That’s how you spread diseases in the garden. The dripper just slowly flushes water out of the soil, so it doesn’t have this problem.

But the best argument in favor of a dropper is time saving. I enjoy my garden, but I don’t like dragging hoses around the yard or being in the sun all the time, and I don’t trust anyone else to water the way I would when I’m not at home. The dripper, and by extension the timer, meant I could walk away and be sure the yard was getting the resources it needed.

What is drip irrigation for your garden?

Drip irrigation is an underground system that sends water from your main plumbing through a backflow preventer into your garden. It first connects to a manifold that separates the water into different lines and zones it needs to enter, and connects to a timer that tells the valves when to open and close. Sounds complicated, and… it is. But it’s not difficult , it’s mostly doable on your own and pays off handsomely.

Why Cheaper Alternatives to Drip Irrigation Don’t Work

There are all kinds of products on the market to help you get halfway to drip irrigation. There are soak hoses that attach to the hose bib, slowly drip water into the soil, and can be attached to timers. Or ollas , which are fired terracotta pots that you plant in the ground, slowly leaching out water and attracting the roots of nearby plants. (Alls have been used by Native Americans since the beginning of horticulture.)

But all these systems have a number of significant drawbacks. To start with, drip systems connected to your hose bib are most likely to be illegal in your state because they require backflow prevention – meaning that once the water is out of the hose bib, it will never come back. back. but if you google “reverse flow, hose bib (your county)” you will most likely find your own rules. Sometimes you will be able to use a built-in backflow device that is small, inexpensive , and easy to install. In other cases, you may need to connect a return flow to your main water line, which is a professional installation.

In my experience, Soaker hoses break quite easily in the sun, but they have another more pressing problem: pressure. The number of gallons per hour (GPH) flowing off the hose breastplate is low, and it is this pressure that makes your drip hoses work all the way, end to end. This is why irrigation systems usually need to be disconnected from your water supply.

Olls are great for remote locations to provide watering at root level, but you need a lot of them and unless you’re a potter, they’re expensive. They are also by their very nature (unfired clay) very brittle. It is recommended to remove them for the winter, which means storage without cracking. Finally, you must complete them all the time. After a few years of ollas, I removed most of it and switched to a drip.

How to Create Drip Irrigation Zones in a Garden

When I finally decided to strap myself onto the IV, I started with the most grown-up thing I have ever done in my garden, which is measuring. I made a chart and outlined the whole space, all the boxes where there was plumbing, a bib, etc. It looked like this.

Next, I started trying to divide it into zones, and visualize where the pipes would go by drawing them on the diagram. Obviously, you want to minimize the number of pipes used, the number of turns, and the intersection of pipes. Feeling confident at this point, I turned to Reddit for help in the landscaping subsection, and in the end, I had a plan that everyone on the forum agreed on, and I learned some valuable tips (for example, always use two clamps on my pipes and always run my drip line in circles instead of lines).

Necessary materials for drip irrigation

Your main lines will be 17mm and use 17mm fittings. You have a choice of how far apart the holes are and how big they are. This is expressed in GPH (gallons per hour). You may want the holes to be spaced closer together for a garden bed than for a shrub by the house. You may need more water (larger holes) for delicate plants like tomatoes, and less water for blueberries that get waterlogged all the time. There is also an “empty” line, which looks exactly like a drip line, but with no holes at all and is designed to get water where you want it to go.

You will also need all these fittings – tees, elbows, crosses and more clamps than you can imagine. I recommend reordering and returning what you don’t use.

trench digging

After all, you have to put these pipes in the ground, and you want them to go under the frost line, which is different in each county . This meant creating many trenches all over my yard. Since it was still spring, the ground was soft from the rain, which made the task much easier. I bought a digging shovel , it is very narrow. If I had wiggle room, I would rent a trencher, no question.

No matter how you make the trenches, you will eventually run into a pavement that you will need to either walk under or go through. Most people will just tunnel under it. You can attach a special hose end to a PVC pipe and use water to try and get through the dirt under the pavement. You could just pierce a metal pipe, but it looked incredibly difficult. There are augers that can pass under the sidewalk and partially get under the roadway. Finally, you can carve out the driveway. After many attempts with water, I finally gave up and cut a narrow channel in the concrete, dug a trench and cemented again. Sounds like a lot of work, but the whole process took ninety minutes and $300. If I rented a saw (I’ll take it next time) it would be much smaller.

Collector and timer

Your water comes from the main into one hose, so you’ll need to separate it into different hoses going to different places and use valves to tell you when to turn on the water and when to stop. This is diversity. You take electronic valves and build a branching PVC octopus while trying to make it as compact as possible to fit in a box built into the ground. This octopus should also accommodate any built-in filters, bleed valves, and manual ball valves. You can buy pre-made manifolds , but I had a lot of fun making my own and learned about the various PVC compounds that can be made to make it more efficient.

The magic sauce that tells the valves when to open and allows you to go on vacation is the timer. The new Wi-Fi timers can sync with local weather stations so they can automatically increase or decrease watering based on the weather. You can also manage or monitor them from your phone. Best of all, they don’t seem significantly more expensive than non-Wi-Fi timers. I took a Hydrawise timer and hooked it up to a weather station I didn’t know existed, three blocks away. The set up took about thirty minutes.

Youtube videos have been indispensable for me in figuring out what to supply and how to connect the manifold valves to my timer. However, once I figured it out, it was easy: each valve has its own colored wire and a common white wire. I could connect all the white wires together with the timer, or connect the white wire from one valve to the next and just run the last wire to the timer.

results

I don’t think I’ve ever taken on a more physically demanding job than digging trenches and installing all the drips. After all the consumables, I actually only saved about 30% of what the professional installers quoted; but while I’d like to skip the work, the truth is that if I chose a professional installation, I wouldn’t have the slightest idea how the system works, where the pipes are, or how I can influence their placement. went or figure out how to branch off from them.

In the end, I installed a ¼” micro-drip line off my 17mm pot line and attached some micro-nebulizers to spray my lawn effectively and added an emitter to fill the birdbath. I would never have been able to do it if I hadn’t built it myself.

My water bill halved over the summer last year, results I’ve been looking forward to. In the Hydrawise app, I was able to see exactly how much I was saving each week and why the timer chose to water more or less. It will take many years to fully recoup my investment, but it was worth it.

My plants had the most prolific disease-free season of my entire gardening career, and I was able to hike on the weekends without worrying about the yard.