How to Water Your Fruit Trees and Plants LOW MAINTENANCE | Drip Irrigation Walkthrough and Tour

hey this is cameron welcome back to the busy gardener channel today we are going to cover something that is probably the most requested thing in the comments of these videos we're going to cover how i do my irrigation let's get busy [Music] one of the things that plants need in addition to nutrition and soil and sun is water i mean it's just like the basis of all living animals and plants and all living things on earth need water in order to survive and so how did in the world do you water 60 something trees with any sort of regularity i mean every one of them has different watering needs different watering amounts some like cacti or very water um don't need a ton of water whereas you know tropical things need a ton of water so trying to figure that out and have it be where it doesn't become an all-consuming thing is really crucial and i want to show you the way that we have done stuff here on the busy gardener orchard and so the main thing that i rely on are drip emitters i use a drip system and i want to talk through kind of the fundamentals of what a drip system is basically a drip system is where you've got water that's being piped in some form that is popping out into these small emitters and these emitters allow you to have varying amounts of water come out there you're able to decide based on the emitter that you choose what the direction do you want to be a 90 degree or do you want it to be like a half circle or like this one do you want to be 360 degrees in every direction and so it allows you to tailor the the direction of what's being watered which is wonderful and helping to keep down weeds another thing that's good about that is that you're able to not use more water than you need so you're not watering areas that you don't want to get water you're only watering the types of plants that do need to get water finally one reason why drip emitters are good is erosion and water waste you know the ground can only absorb so much water at any given point so if you came through with a hose and just watered like crazy especially like this silty soil that we have up here a bunch of water would just run off and little would get down into the root system of those plants and a whole lot of it would just be off where you don't want it so what this does is these drip emitters rather than a hose putting out 220 gallons an hour one of these puts out maybe 14 gallons an hour and so the rate at which that thing is being watered is a lot lower so i'll turn on my system let's say for two or three or four hours or whatever it is depending on the watering needs and allow it to go like that i want to walk through and show you kind of how i've spaced some of these and show a few examples of how i've spaced them with the individual trees and what i'm using for that as well as how i'm kind of what's the initiator of it where does the the water source start for us and so maybe we'll start with the water source let's take a look at it all right so this is kind of the the brains if you will or the little central hub of how we handle our irrigation up here for drip systems there are a couple of things that need to be true one is you want the water the pressure that's coming in to be stepped down drip systems are made to be used between like 25 and 35 or 40 psi it'll usually say on whatever it is on what the psi is so you want to use something that's a pressure regulator that brings that pressure down something you also want to do is because these have such small openings generally you need and want some sort of filter and in this case here we have an inline filter we have a pressure regulator here this is an inline filter i'm always reluctant to unscrew this just because i don't ever want to create a leak but this has a filter that allows the water to pass through and catches any debris so that way that debris doesn't end up inside the inside the emitters eventually and so that you want that to be in place now those are two kind of basics that ought to be true everywhere that you're doing a drip system pressure regulation and you want filtration and these are both easily found what you do after that is really up to you i wanted to do something that is as automatic as possible without having to think about it and so what i did was i have this water supply coming up here through this pipe down through the pressure regulator the filter going down here into this irrigation valve it's like a sprinkler valve and so what this is allowing us to do is um turn this thing on and off on an automated schedule that's tied into my irrigation controller my irrigation controller is attached to wi-fi it's able to see based on the weather whether or not it ought to be giving it more or less water so i love having this just be an automatic process that's really important to me because i don't want to have to be thinking about it i get busy it gets sidetracked and so that's how we do it now i have it going from there in this case i have three main half inch lines that are coming off of this and that's through the kind of this manifold here it's kind of a three i created this three you know three outlet manifold and each one is going to this half inch drip line and so this is kind of the main line and on each of these three lines i've installed a shut off switch so this way i'm able to have different lines on or different lines off depending on the season for example when all of the the deciduous trees are dormant i don't need everything being watered i only really want the citrus to be watered at that time so this allows me to turn off the deciduous trees turn on just the the citrus um and the subtropical like the avocado the banana and stuff this is kind of the brain how i have it set up this has worked so well since we set it up a few years ago let's go talk about the individual emitters in some of the spacing okay so here we are beneath our nectarine planting here and right in the middle of this thing i see that we've got this little 360 degree basic emitter and um what that emitter does is it sends as i just described water out in 360 degrees this is the top of it the anatomy of a drip system is you've got water coming in through this little quarter inch pipe or tubing and then you can choose the emitter kind of choose your own adventure with these things you take it and it's got a little threading on it and you just thread it in place put it in the ground attach this to the drip line and water will come out and if you decide that you need to put either a higher amount of water coming out of this or you want a different pattern of spray then you can just unscrew this and put a new one in something you want to look at as you as you make your decision on these is you want to look at how many gallons per hour this puts out as well as the diameter what area is going to cover i think this one puts out something like 14 gallons an hour and the diameter i think is maybe seven feet which because i have these planted um pretty close maybe 24 inches to 36 inches on center the trunks from trunk to trunk i use one that has a little bit smaller pattern doesn't put out as much water but some of those need a little bit further or they need a little bit more water and so this one for example is i think 22 gallons per hour the diameter is 14 feet instead of seven feet so this is going to have a spray that goes out further and it's going to pump out more water per hour and so as you see the needs of your trees you might find yourself swapping these out as i have so for example on this nectarine here we've got this 14 gallon an hour maybe six seven feet across it's been over here in our cherry planting i noticed that this cherry will uh exhibit usually some some kind of dehydration stress and uh lack of water stress the leaves will kind of be drooping and so i have something that's putting out more gallons per hour for these cherry plantings to keep them happy what i've got here and you can't see it and i don't want to really uncover it i'll show you an area where it has naturally gotten exposed but we have that half inch line running through the rows here and using the barb the barbed end here there's a hole punch that punctures a little hole in the half inch tubing and this just pops in it is so stinking easy if you've ever done uh you know like sprinklers for your lawn you know that working with that pvc piping you've got it's so rigid you've got to make sure that the lengths are exactly right this is so easy to use once you've laid your initial half line you could seriously get the entire orchard i think i did in a single afternoon i was able to go through run the tubing run the extension tubing and just plug it into these lines um i mentioned to you that i have the deciduous and subtropical on different lines you know it's okay to run this quarter inch line you know all the way over there if you're needing to to get it into a specific half inch so um very very flexible in terms of its use you're you're not really tied into anything it's very easy to deploy and i think you'll find it really accessible let's take a look at some of that half inch line so you have an idea of what that looks like [Music] as we're going to look at the half inch line here's an example on these uh blackberries and boysenberries how we're using a semicircle it's only tran some you know sending water out in a semicircle 180 degrees and so that way it's not watering this mulch over here it's only spraying into the planting and making sure that this plant here is getting water and this blackberry plant here is getting watered so really the row is getting watered without water getting thrown in every other direction here is the half inch auction i'll show you right here this is a great example of exposed half inch so this is the half inch line that's feeding the rest of the whole setup here you see that we've got that barb going into the half inch that's following this tubing here going into this emitter that's a 360 degree emitter and this 360 degree emitter is watering both this section of pluri and this santa rosa plum on this side and what we've done on this row is in between each planting we've got a 360 degree emitter so that way it's getting this side and that side and we have one planted every space in between kind of a pro tip which i need to come back through and refresh them let's jump over here is and this is faded but if you look down here you see how i've got this bright pink flag tape the point of that is you attach that so you don't step on these things when you step on sprinklers they break and so try to especially with my big fat feet so i try to avoid that and putting some flag tape on that has raised the visibility and there's a ton of contrast so that's something that might be helpful for you in that case um i noticed that there is one that the top had broken off we're going to talk through why you ought to periodically come out and check your stuff let's go take a look at it okay here we are there's one downside if there's one major downside to drip irrigation versus using something like a broadcast sprinkle or like a big rain bird thing it's that these these little emitters sometimes will just break or get clogged for no reason and you won't know it until something's dead and so it's a good idea to periodically i don't know once a month come out and just run your system and just walk around and make sure that everything is emitting now these are identical emitters this one is missing something that this one has and you can see that the top of this is literally blown off and i noticed that there was something askew when i walked through here and you're seeing spray spray and then just here was like a little geyser coming straight up and so that was just going straight up that's not watering out here it's just going straight up and coming right down and so this isn't serving its purpose so we need to replace it and we're going to do that right now i'm going to show you how easy it is to swap something like this out just uncover the line that you have and you can either um try to unplug this from the half inch but i don't really want to damage that or have to put in what they call a goof plug and poke another hole i'm just going to um in line i'm going to first of all take this thing apart all i'm going to do is with my pruning shears come through cut this line take this new one plug it in this takes a little bit of hand strength and that was surprising to me at first take out this old busted one sorry kyle for getting you with some water there put in the new spike take this here cover it with some mulch or whatever you want to cover it if you want to bury it take a minute to do that this is now going to water how easy was that what did it take a minute less than a minute one snip one plug and you're done so that's one thing that i really like about it even though the reliability is a little bit suspect sometimes i do like the idea that it's still so easy to repair these things make changes when you need to um so that's uh that's what we do across the entire orchard with so the fickleness of these things getting clogged is um there are some real world issues with that because beautiful passion fruit that has done such a wonderful job gorgeous flowers growing along this fence so nicely wasn't doing anything and i thought why isn't this thing growing the other one grew so prolifically as you've seen in other videos why is this thing just still almost the same size as when i bought it so i came down here and i turned on the water and this thing wasn't having any water at all come out of it not a single drop was coming out i thought what in the world and so i started wiggling this thing the little emitter here this is more like a dripper it doesn't shoot so much water in every direction it's more directional and just puts more water out in a smaller area and what i noticed was there were little pieces of worm coming out of this and so i unscrewed the top of this and out through that came worm little chunks of worm it was disgusting but we got it cleared out and it was pretty amazing to see with just um a little bit of water added to this thing this thing is just totally blown up now look at this look at these beautiful flowers that this passion fruit puts out and these turn into that beautiful fruit this is the frederick passion fruit [Music] and like i mentioned each one of these has kind of their own watering needs and you're able to customize depending on what the the various needs are like that banana that needs lots of water to be happy it's you know tropical plant avocados they're notoriously thirsty plants they need a lot of water and as you follow this channel these avocados oh my goodness to see this thing actually alive and thriving look at all these buds that are coming out of here i'm so happy about that but they need more water and so maybe there's an emitter that wasn't going to put out enough water for the plant even though i have these higher gallon per hour emitters here something you can also do is you might see that this one is here but i also have one hidden under there i have a second one that's coming in watering this house avocado and making sure that this has enough water and so that's another way to do it too if there isn't a single emitter that is going to give you as much water as you need you can just double up run two lines from your half inch and that will help water to make sure all this wonderful avocado fruit on here grows that looks like it got cut off okay well that's that's not part of it i don't think that was any i have no idea what that could have been is that even an active god what is that that's no animal who knows these things need water in order to be happy you're able to give them water with the flexibility of a drip system and again you don't have to re-pipe stuff what would you do if you needed to do a second pipe of like pvc pipe would you have to go and dig up and run or are you able to just quickly zap in another another half inch or a quarter inch and just run it over here so you can see enough water in these two avocados even with the intense heat that we've had recently are both thriving really well in this environment well as you can see i mean all of these emitters with a drip system can fit inside a little box here to make it super convenient you just walk through the orchard put in a little pair of clippers in there and that's all you end up needing drip irrigation is by far the easiest most flexible method that i've seen as i've had to do a bunch of work in the in my yard and running irrigation lines drip systems make this process so easy so i would say if there are a couple of takeaways do a drip system that is tied to your irrigation or some sort of timer so that way you're not having to come out and manually initiate stuff so that way when a hot weight heat wave comes through you don't get blasted out because you forgot to water i know in some cases you know you want to go out and you want to water some things by hand if you want to do that do that too but we found that drip irrigation especially for the number of trees that we've got going on here has proven to be the most flexible method well i want to thank you for tuning in to this episode of the busy gardener where we walk through how i do my irrigation i hope that answered some questions for you but i know that it may have also raised a number of questions for you so if that's the case put those in the description below are in your comments area below i always go through there and make sure to interact as much as i can if you're not yet subscribed to the busy gardener channel hey would love for you to do that if you feel like we've earned your subscription with this and the other videos that would be a great thing to do hit the notification bell so you can know when new videos are being posted and hit that like button because that lets other people know about the channel makes us feel though so good well whether you've got one drip emitter in your orchard or 500 until next time stay busy [Music] you

Channel: The Busy Gardener

Views: 15,919

Rating: 4.9242902 out of 5

Keywords: how to water fruit trees, watering fruit trees, drip irrigation, setting up drip irrigation, fruit trees, back yard orchard, backyard garden, backyard orchard, fruit tree care, drip system, automatic watering, byoc, dave wilson nursery, fruit tree irrigation, watering plants

Id: yfZf50ULM7c

Length: 19min 22sec (1162 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 28 2020