Drip irrigation systems make sense on a number of levels.
Plants need water at the roots, which is what drip watering accomplishes.
This is how you spread disease in the garden.
Drip just slowly leaches water the soil, so it doesnt have that issue.
But the best argument for drip is time savings.
What is drip irrigation for your garden?
That sounds complicated and…it is.
But its nothard, it is mostly doable on your own, and pays off in spades.
(Ollas have been in use by Native Americans for as long as gardening has existed.)
But all of these systems have some major drawbacks.
Sometimes, youll be able to use an inline backflow gear, which aresmall, inexpensiveand easy to install.
Thats why irrigation systems generally need to come off your water main.
Theyre also, by their very nature (under-fired clay) very fragile.
Its recommended you remove them for winter which means storing them without cracking them.
Lastly, you have to fill them all the time.
After a few years of ollas, I removed most and went to drip.
It looked like this.
You have choices on how far apart the holes are and how big they are.
This is expressed in GPH (gallons per hour).
You may want holes closer together for a vegetable bed than for your shrubs against the house.
I recommend over-ordering and returning what you dont use.
It meant making a slew of trenches all over my yard.
I bought atrenching shovel, which is very narrow.
If I had the room to maneuver it, Id rent a trencher, no question.
Most people will simply tunnel under it.
you’re able to just pound a metal pipe through, but that looked impossibly hard.
There areaugersthat can run under a sidewalk and get you partially under a driveway.
Finally, it’s possible for you to cut the driveway.
It sounds like a lot of work, but that entire process took ninety minutes and $300.
If Id rented the saw (next time I will) it would have been far less.
This is a manifold.
That octopus also needs to accommodate any inline filters, blowout valves and manual ball valves.
The magic sauce that tells the valves when to openand make it possible to go on vacationis a timer.
it’s possible for you to also control them or monitor them from your phone.
Best of all, they dont seem to be significantly more expensive than non-wifi enabled timers.
I went with theHydrawisetimer, and connected it to a weather station I didnt know existed three blocks away.
Set-up took about thirty minutes.
I would never have been able to do that without having built it myself.
My water bill last year went down by half for the summer, the results Id anxiously waited for.
It will take many years to get back my full investment, but it was still worth it.
