Installing a Drip Irrigation System for Raised Beds

hey folks today I'm going to show you how I install my drip system in my raised beds over there coming from my standard hose bib now the first thing that I do is on all of my hose bibs I have a back backflow preventer now what this is is this little brass thing here that connects to the bib it only allows water to flow one way and that is out the purpose of this is that anything you have attached to this whether it be a garden hose or a drip system or a lawn sprinkler or anything like that anything that can get in the system into the hose will not be able to get back up into the water system and then conceivably work its way back into the house where you could actually ingest it so that's the purpose of this is to keep any contaminants from flowing back into the system so that's the first thing that I have and I have these on all my outdoor hose bibbs the second thing that I install is a splitter on my bib then the purpose of this is I can run my drip system off one side and I can run the standard hose that I have for just watering you know pots the stuff I have laying around so that I can you know I can run two things at one time with this so I'm gonna go ahead and throw this on and the good thing about this little splitter is that has shutoff valves for each side and this also is a pretty cheap one but it's just plastic they do make these ones that are like brass and they have LED in them and I don't I don't like those I don't you know whenever it says you know known in the state of California to cause cancer that kind of just kind of like you might as well draw a skull and crossbones on as far as I'm concerned okay so the next thing I install after that is I install my timer now this timer is just a cheap I don't want to say cheap I want to say inexpensive it's only about 20 bucks and it's a manual timer and a two-port manual timer and the way that this works is you just turn it to the amount of time that you want your water to run and it does have a manual on you can turn it to manual on and then it'll just run as long as you you know if you want so this goes up to a hundred twenty minutes so you turn this all the way up to here and it'll run for a hundred twenty minutes then of course you can back it off at any time and this hat also has a little kind of a screen not really filtered but it's a screen to keep kind of like sediment and stuff out so that goes on next so we put this on here like that and then the next thing we want to install a pressure regulator now what this does is my my well puts out quite a bit of pressure my Wells putting out about thirty gallons a minute and what this will do is this that's just way too much pressure for a drip system it'll just blow those emitters right off of there so you want to back that pressure off so this is a standard you get them in different sizes I think you get like 10 15 20 30 psi I've got a 30 psi because I have quite a quite a long run and they're they're pretty good size beds so I go ahead and stall install this on there and let me show you how this works you'll notice a big difference let me turn both of these on and then I'll turn this on and you'll notice a big difference when I when I turn the water on I see you notice this is a pretty good floor that's not on all the way that's pretty divorce and that's just a steady stream so this is you know when I turned out all the way up it starts getting quite a bit of pressure but this will only allow 30 psi okay so that's mine that's my next step now the next step is to install a filter now this filter here you'll see where it has the arrow the arrow is is out this way so the water's going to come off you need to install it like this now this filter here when I say filter I'm not talking about contaminants and things like that I'm only talking about sediment I'm talking about like any kind of dirt or anything like that that can get into the system somehow and it just unscrews here and Excite miss Jo it's just a washable filter where you could just take it and you know just wash it out and stuff like that so that's that okay so this is not a really complicated system I think a lot of people are intimidated by these because they've never done them or see them operate they're very it's a very really simple them to to install a drip system and there's there's a million ways that people do this so the next step out of the filter this is threaded now there's two schools of thought here I've seen some people take a standard 1/2 inch tube you know a drip system tube connector and you know thread it in and then they run their drip tube their half-inch drip tube out all the way to the raised beds now I don't do that now I should also show you what's what's going on here the the color-coding now this green this means that this is a 1/2 inch tubing so the 1/2 inch tubing it's basically just kind of a friction fit you just pop the tube in you know push it in really good and it just stays in now that's great and I know that it works for a lot of people but I don't do that because this I don't have it well it's it's a ways away from here but the the the standard but you know the drip tubing is not really thick it's not it's not hard and it's it's susceptible to breakage and and whatnot so I don't I don't use that at the at the length of the source what I have is I use a regular PVC connector I put my PVC connector in okay and then what I do is I run standard PVC pipe I'll go down with a little elbow go down and then I'll bury it about 6 inches underground and I'll go all the way over to my bed and then I'll come up in my bed all wood standard PVC pipe because I think PVC pipe is just it's the best way to go you don't it's not susceptible to breakage and and it just I trust it a lot better than I do that flexible and when we get to the raised bed I'll show you how flexible that pipe really is and I think you'll understand so I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna put an elbow in here go down I'm gonna go all the way over to the raised bed which is about 20 feet from here and then I'm going to come up in the raised bed and then when I get to the raised bed I'll show you how I connect the drip line to the standard PVC pipe ok ok so here I am at the raised bed now you'll notice I've come up here with 3/4 pipe I got my pipe coming in my trench here I just need to fill that in the 3/4 pipe comes up and I've got a tee joint on here now the reason for the joint is because I have a raised bed over there this is my grape arbor right here have a raised bed a full raised bed there this one here is still a work in progress so what I've done is I've taken a connector here well first off I've got a reducer that takes the three quarter to half-inch and then I have a half inch pipe running this way to go to the other bed and then on this one here you take the little connector I got one right here I'll show you this connects half-inch PVC to this drip tubing this half-inch drip tubing now you'll take a look at this drip tubing and you'll see how kind of flexible this is it's very flexible it's not very thick it's pretty durable for its size but I don't trust it underground like I said no you have to take one of these connectors connect it to here and then the tubing just popped in I've got a small piece of tubing here that I cut pops into there and then pops into here into an elbow and then this is just capped off here this is just what's called a hose plug an end plug and I put this on here so that I can run my system and not have to worry about it dripping out this side because I'm still working on this side so now for this side here what I have is you'll notice I have the half-inch going around coming up and I have one of these connectors right here at the end of the PVC I push in the half-inch there's a drift tubing and then I've got it going up here over top of my grape arbor and then down over here now you'll notice where I've got it right here I've got another elbow coming down into this bed and then I go back into another one of these because I want to go back to PVC pipe because I want to put in this ball valve so what I've done is I put a small piece of half-inch in here of PVC pipe but the ball valve in another piece of half-inch pipe and then a connector with a screw end on it and then this here is a connector that you use it's called a compression adapter 1/2 inch so basically i've gone from the half inch tubing to pc to PVC with the valve and then back to the tubing and then once i go back to the tubing then i bring it along where I want it ok so now let me show you some ways that you can attach this tubing and make it work for your beds ok so what I've done here is I've started my bed my tubing in my bed on this side here now like I said before there are millions of ways that you can do this the these two rows here are how I like to do them but you can do it any way you want and I don't think there's really a wrong way or you know or the right way to do it I think if you can just centralize your drip and control the amount of water going to each plant I think you've got it made so yeah I mean there are so many people that are so dogmatic about it that you know they'll criticize the way people have their drip systems but you know whatever works for you it's I mean that's the right way so the way that I do it is I take my half inch tubing and I go right along the plant row okay and then what I do is at each plant I pop in an emitter these emitters here are a two gallon per hour emitter the thing I like about these they're called flag emitters let me show you one right here the beauty of these is that you can pop these apart and you can clean them that's why I like these a lot of the other ones that are they look like kind of a little kids tops that you spin I don't like them because they're encapsulated they're just plastic and encapsulated and you can't pop them open and clean them these here you can clean that's why I use these okay so now one of the this is the configuration that I use and there are some people that will take and run one like I've got over here they will run one down the center here and I just put this one in so you guys could see it they will run a tube down the center of two rows and then they will take this tubing here this little quarter inch tubing and they will take the quarter inch tubing and then pop it in to the hose with a small connector like this like this and basically you pop your hole in push this in and then the little tubing coordinates tubing goes on to that and then your little the emitter goes on to the end of the tubing so you know you just cut off the certain amount of length that you need and I don't do it that way because this little tubing this is let me see if you can see how small that is it doesn't like to play well and once you put these in a lot of times when you you you pop these in and then you you know you get it just where you want it and it's perfect and then you'll walk away the Sun will come out or something and this thing was perfectly on the plant and all of a sudden it's decided that it wants to be over here and I've I've had bad luck with those so I don't use them but what you can also do is you can anchor them somewhat with these little anchors you pop this in and then your tubing goes you know it just snaps into the tubing like this and then you you know push this in and it kind of helps it but this doesn't always work either I've seen these just pull right out especially if you have soft soil like mine's pretty low me and it you know unless you've got like rock and Jack ham or something in an epoxy it in I don't like these I've just never had good luck with these I I come out a lot of times and I'm spending half my time fixing those tubes so I don't I don't typically use them but I ran it down here so that you could see and I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna put one in so that you can see it now the first thing that you want to do is if you have a pair of of trimmers that's what I used to cut this tubing with okay and then to make the hole you have a little tube tool like this that you just squeeze and it punctures a hole in the tubing now these here are pretty self-explanatory you just take in squeeze you figure out where you want the hole pop it in drop the emitter in and you're done these here you have to be a little more careful the reason is is because you want to be able to get it at least angled toward the plant so you want to kind of have it off to the side kind of like kind of like this okay so you kind of line it up and squeeze like that and you'll notice that it's I don't know if you can see it but it's kind of you know off to one side like that and then you take and you measure your tubing not like this and you cut your tubing okay you take your connector like that and you pop it in you'll hear you should hear a pop like that and then you just pop this on like that and then you throw your emitter on yeah dad look see this another reason why I don't like these if you don't push those in all the way they just kind of walk away from you okay so there we go and then you take your little thing here and you're good to go you can turn this down like this and you just aim it right at the bottom of the plant and you're good to go now like I say I don't like these because these are just they just they don't they don't play well so now another way that I've seen some people do which I don't like and I don't know why they do it I suppose they save a lot of money on these little emitters but what they will do is they will kind of suspend this a little bit and they'll just pop the holes in like this along the way they don't bother using the emitters and they just let the water kind of drip out of the holes and you could do that you could regulate it down there at the ball valve that's why I put the ball valve in and you could do it that way but the problem is is that as dirt kind of kicks up and whatnot it can fill into the holes and then you've got you've got dirt in your lines and you don't you don't want to do it that way so now one other thing too is that when you're doing this you want to make sure that you use plenty of these anchors and if you've got really loose soil like I do you're gonna have to use quite a few of them now what will happen is as the Sun comes out these will as they heat up they will kind of you know kind of you know soften up and kind of mold themselves to the bed so it's not as critical you know as it warms up but right now these things come in a big spool huge spool and it it you just just like to kind of like jump up on you so be aware of that and now let me show you over here what I've done on this side right here what I've done is you see this I have another one of these end hoes plugs and the reason why I have this now this will end up going all the way down when I put more rows in the reason why I will keep this here and this is just gonna stop at the corner of the bed is because sometimes you know every you know every couple months or so you're gonna want to blow these out so you I pull this over to the side and then I turned the water on full bore and I just let it flush the system now if there's any dirt or anything in there it'll just flush the system completely out so that's why I have an N plug on that okay now I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna turn it on I'm going to show you these emitters operating okay so now I'm over here at my ball valve and what I'll do is I'll just turn this on a little bit so you can see it okay now here's the beauty of the heaven that that valve in here is that I can adjust how much pressure that I want coming out to each plant when I crank it up right there I'm running about two gallons per hour right there or about now these are little seedlings and I don't want to gallons per hour run in there because they're just they're really small so I can I have the ability with this valve is to crank this down like that and just let them kind of drip out like that okay and you'll notice this one here is working fine too and I'm just going to go ahead and put you know the rest of these in along here but I typically don't do it this way and there's some people that like it that way but as the root system says these plants get bigger the root systems will get pretty big so as long as they're in the in the proximity of the of the root you're gonna be just fine okay so I know a lot of people ask well why would I want to use a drip system well for one reason that the biggest reason is you want to target just the plants you want to water just the plant and the second thing is that you're not watering weeds if you were to just spray this bed with water and you know saturate it you're going to be helping the weeds grow and anything else that's in there and thirdly is you're preserving water which is a really good thing and also when you spray water back and forth you're not only just spraying the whole bed you're you're watering the wood and you're watering the ground outside and you know so yeah this is just this is the way to go so I would love to hear any comments you might have I'd love to see your systems post videos give me links and whatnot and I'd love to see how you guys have yours so all right well there is the way I do it and I'm not necessarily saying it's the the right way or the most efficient way but it's the way I've been doing it so okay and one thing I need to add is that you want to make sure that you if you live in an area where you get freezing temperatures at night you want to make sure that you take this system down and put it in for the winter because it's just not going to with Dan so you got plastic stuff here and this timer just is not going to last so you want to make sure that you do take it down and drain the system blow the PVC pipe out and all the tubing and stuff like that blow it out before you put it away and you know what before you put this away I just leave the tubing and everything in the bed but yeah you want to make sure that you just get this off before it freezes so all right catch y'all later be sure to stop over to grow your heirlooms calm where we have podcast gardening Q&A tips on year-round gardening survival gardening and current projects that are going on

Channel: Grow Your Heirlooms

Views: 2,523,485

Keywords: DIY, garden, indoor, gardening, vegetables, winter, containers, soil, compost, potting, trees, seeds, watering plants, irrigation, drip system, drip, system, PVC, tube, raised, beds, emmiters, raised bed, install drip irrigation, raised garden bed, vegtable garden, wooden garden bed, raised bed gardening, diy raised bed, build a raised garden bed, dripworks

Id: SbYRdvEUJ70

Length: 19min 18sec (1158 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 03 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/JollyOleReddit]

I'm not affiliated with this Youtuber but I thought he did a good job of breaking down a drip irrigation system for raised beds.

This year will be my first year installing one in my garden beds.

Now that spring is on the horizon, how many of you have drip irrigation systems? Do you have any tips or tricks for newbies?

I'd love to hear your thoughts...

[u/ferrarisnowday]

This was pretty interesting. It definitely makes me want to consider an irrigation system of my own. Just glancing at home depot's website this stuff is a lot cheaper than I had figured. 100 feet of the black half inch tubing is just 10 bucks and all of the fittings and valves seem to be in the $1 - $2 range. I guess it could add up quickly, but it's still a lot cheaper than I figured.

[u/mtux96]

I may redo my sprinkler set up to add a switch and a drip irrigation system for my trees. Right now, it waters my entire backyard with a single sprinkler head. If I add a switch I can turn off the sprinkler and only water using the drip system on my trees and more important plants rather than the lawn as well. Might be a good idea on drought conditions so my trees can get more water while using less. I can still occasionally water the lawn as well if needed with a flip of the switch. Just will require more digging up the lawn that has grass this time.