The Drip Irrigation System

After becoming very tired of lugging around hoses, and the inordinate amount of time that it takes to keep a garden properly watered here in perpetual drought country, we have gone drip.

We put in a system composed of T-tape, with all the various fittings that it takes to bring the water to the plants. The T-tape that we are using has an emitter every twelve inches that puts out about one third of a gallon of water per hour. It can be used either on the surface of the ground or buried up to a couple of feet deep - though I don't know why a backyard gardener would ever need to bury it that deep. We have used the surface of the ground application for ease. The tape is held in position by metal stakes placed, well, wherever we felt we needed to put one.

For our gardens, we purchased 1000' of the actual drip tape, 100' of the poly pipe that the tape hooks in to, and a bag full of the various fittings needed to put it all together. It also required the purchase of an in-line pressure regulator to bring the water pressure down to 10psi whenever we use water from our well. Water from our rain tanks doesn't appear to need a regulator since there is no pump attached to the rain harvesting system (at this time). Total cost of the supplies was under 150 bucks...and we have plenty of the T-tape left to do more beds.

The photo above shows the connection that I have concocted to hook into our newest beds. I am currently in the process of building what will be either three or maybe four beds outside of our backyard area. The beds are directly below our 1600 gallon rain tank and ideally situated to use the rainwater. The three (or four) beds will all be plumbed together with 3/4 inch PVC pipe so that only one hose attachment (the one above) is necessary to water any one of the beds. I can turn on or off the 3/4 inch ball valves to water whichever bed I need to, and eliminate the need to drag hoses between the beds, further simplifying the watering process...ok, so it was my wife's idea initially, but it was my design.

So far we have been getting just enough rain to where we haven't had to use the irrigation system much, but when we have it seemed that three hours gave the area a decent soaking. Two hours may be just about enough. Hopefully we will get some rain this summer so that the rainwater tanks can handle the bulk of our supplemental watering.