Everyone Can Grow A Garden (2018) #18: Drip Irrigation

[Music] hi everyone I'm Susan Mulvahill and I'm back out in my vegetable garden today you know water is the key ingredient to having a successful vegetable garden if those plants do not get enough water they are going to struggle and they're not going to produce well so that is the topic of today's video I've been getting a lot of requests from folks about our watering system because we use a drip irrigation system and you know I can't say enough good things about drip irrigation that's because it puts water right down at the soil surface so that the plants roots can get to it if you use overhead watering and I realize sometimes that's the only option you have but it can be very wasteful because the water is up in the air it evaporates it hits pathways and sidewalks and those are areas that don't need any water at all so I really love drip irrigation and wanted to talk to you about that today we haven't always had a drip irrigation system so I wanted to explain the brief history of watering in our garden so you understand the progression we went through at first we had a very simple setup if you can even call it that we had an overhead sprinkler no timer and we had to remember to turn it on and turn it off as a result our garden really struggled so then my husband put in an underground water line to the garden he got a sprinkler timer and we connected that to some soaker hoses suddenly the garden started doing better aha unfortunately the problem with soaker hoses is that those little weep holes that the water comes out through can get plugged with minerals especially if you live somewhere like I do where there's minerals in the water and so every so often we'd notice a garden bed was struggling and we would have to poke new holes in the soaker hose and then they would do better but that was a real problem and of course we used very cheap soaker hoses from a home center and so they didn't last very long so five years ago my husband put in a drip irrigation system and we have never looked back because it has done so well so now let's look at the setup we have a PVC water line that goes from our house to a sprinkler control box in the garden the pipe is connected to several electrical sprinkler valves which are controlled by a sprinkler timer from each valve a one-inch distribution pipe delivers water to our two zones in the garden each zone contains multiple garden beds so let's look at a row of bed so you can see how they get watered now before I get started I wanted to explain that this is just how we set up our system there are so many different ways of doing drip irrigation and there are a lot of local and online drip irrigation suppliers that can give you great advice and suggestions so just remember this is how ours is set up you don't have to do it the same way but I do get a lot of questions about our system so that's what I want to show you the main line that's supplying the beds is underground and then at each individual bed is a particular setup which I'm going to show you a close-up of but that underground line is a one inch black poly pipe so just to use this row as an example that 1-inch distribution line that I spoke up is under the ground here and at each bed they have their own watering setup so there's the one-inch line then the setup when we get to the middle of a bed the 1-inch line and then the same setup on the next bed and so on so that gives you the overview now before I move on I just wanted to clarify one other thing so this area of three large raised beds is something we added to the garden about four years ago and it has a slightly different setup in that the riser that supplies the water to each bed is at the corner rather than in the middle and my husband like this much better so let's look at how the water gets supplied to each of the raised beds and please ignore this upright PVC pipe that has nothing to do with the watering system it's actually part of a support system for hoops and covers that I use on the bed at different times of the year now remember there's a one-inch distribution line underground - it is attached this upright PVC riser which is clamped to the side of the bed just for stability then there is a PVC elbow attached and to it is attached this valve which allows us to turn the water on or off to the beds this bed hasn't been planted yet so it's perfect for showing you what's on top of the bed now this pipe here is called a manifold it has holes punched into it and little fittings too which are attached the watering lines this is what supplies the water to the plants now we're using drip tape that's something that was suggested to us by a friend years ago and we've been very happy with it but there are certainly other types of drip irrigation tubing that you can use now this bed is four feet wide and we rotate through it either a corn crop tomatoes or winter squash and we've found those crops really need quite a lot of water so you'll notice my husband has put six water lines to this bed in our three foot wide beds we have four water lines there are some plants that definitely don't do well with overhead watering and that would be tomatoes and potatoes because they're very susceptible to disease and having the water on the leaves is an easy way for it to spread however one thing that we've discovered over the years is that lettuce seems to really benefit from overhead watering it just does better so what my husband did is he attached some drip tubing to the manifold and then he placed three risers into the garden bed and then on top of them he put some micro sprayers and they gently missed the lettuce plants they just love it two important components of a drip irrigation system are the pressure reducing valve and a pre-filter what the pressure reducing valve does is it makes sure that there's not too much water pressure going through your system and you'll be able to find out what your system requires by either asking the supplier or reading the literature the pre-filter filters out silt and other types of small debris before it hits your watering system and the way it works is you can just drain it off every so often to make sure that nothing is clogging your lines so when is the best time to water well early morning is ideal that's because there will be a minimal amount of evaporation and also if the plant's leaves should get wet it gives them a chance to dry off very quickly as the temperatures start warming up one of the things that I think can be really challenging is knowing how long to water your plants especially if you put in a new system but the best way to do it is to water them for the same amount of time over the course of a few days maybe let's say 15 minutes or 20 minutes and then keeping an eye on the plants especially at the peak of the day when it's at its hottest and throughout the day to see if they look like they're wilting if they are you need to be watering them a little bit more but you won't stick with the same amount of watering time for the entire growing season because as our temperatures really start heating up those plants are going to need more water so be very observant and respond to them if you see any kind of struggling on the plants parts increase the amount of time that you water them now a lot of folks ask me well what do you do with your watering set up during the winter months because of course we're in zone five climate and we get very cold harsh winters well actually what my husband does in the fall when he's blowing out the rest of our sprinklers he opens up all of the valves on the raised beds he uses an air compressor and he blows the water out of those lines so that way he can leave everything in place and not have to worry about any lines freezing I hope you found this video interesting and helpful you know drip irrigation is not quite as scary and complicated as it might seem on my website Susan's in the garden comm starting on June 24th I will have a blog post that is for my June 24th garden column and also has this video embedded in it and within that blog post I will have some interesting and useful information along with some links that I think you'll find helpful so be sure to check that out in the meantime happy gardening [Music]

Channel: Susan's In The Garden

Views: 33,337

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Id: AHvWFn7v7y4

Length: 10min 13sec (613 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 22 2018