It Lasted 5 Years! But now it's time to replace Our Drip Tape Irrigation.

hey everybody welcome back to living traditions homestead well we have had a very wet spring here in missouri but you know what they say all good things must come to an end and it looks like possibly that has come to an end for us and today it is just plain hot and humid supposed to be 90 degrees and barely a cloud in the sky but a wet spring means we haven't had to water our garden at all but what is typical here in southern missouri is to have a very very wet spring but then the rain completely disappears from the rest of the summer and in order to get a really good harvest out of your garden that means you need to water all summer long so today we need to put in our drip irrigation system we've been using the same drip tape irrigation system for about the last five years this year it's time to replace it so we thought we would go over with you guys in detail everything from you know opening up the new system all the components that come with it show you how to use them all so that when you get a drip irrigation system for your garden you'll know exactly what to do now over the years we have tried many many different ways to water our garden we've tried soaker hoses soaker balls just plain old watering wands buckets the sprinklers all those kinds of things it turns out that this drip tape irrigation system that we're using these days really is by far the best system we've ever used now today we're going to be talking specifically about drip tape irrigation which for a larger garden a bigger area like we're doing is really the way to go because it waters very efficiently uses very little water pressure and you can water large areas with this type of system that's one thing that we struggled with when we were growing in the size of our gardens is to find one type of system that could water a large area at one time we stumbled onto these kind of kits like all supplied kits to do a large garden at a time and we've been satisfied with this kind of system for quite a while now over over five years we've been using it for probably seven or eight years right so one of the main benefits of watering with drip irrigation or drip tape irrigation versus like overhead watering is that you're not losing a lot of water to evaporation you're not you know spraying the tops of your plants with water which can lead to things like fungal diseases blights and actually if you water during the heat of the day with an overhead system you can actually burn your plants from the water itself not only that but other types of irrigation methods like hand watering and watering with the bucket it's really time consuming the larger of a garden the more things you're growing the more time it takes to water all of that and as we all get involved and more and more on our homesteads we have less and less time to devote to just watering our gardens and all of our plants so those are just a few of the reasons we really feel like the drip tape irrigation is the way to go because once it's set up it's really just a matter of hooking your hose up letting it run for the amount of time that you think is necessary for your garden and then you know going on with your day and just coming back to either shut it off or put it on a timer if you want and you can water your garden very efficiently now in the description of this video i will leave a link to uh an article that i found that helped me figure out how long to run the drip irrigation system for because that's one question that we get a lot is you know how much time should you let a drip irrigation system run there's a lot of calculations that go into it depending on the the spacing of the emitters on the actual drip tape that you get the gallon per hours of those emitters and the saw overall size of your garden it's a pretty complicated thing to figure out but there's a real simple formula i will leave a link to that article in the description of this video so you guys can see it but the bottom line is like in our situation for our size garden we let our drip irrigation system run for about three hours three times a week now what we're trying to do is we are trying to mimic the rain patterns that the garden and the plants in the gardens what they need generally a vegetable garden will require about one inch of rain per week and so when we don't get one inch of rain a week then that's where we come in and start our watering system and like kevin said we'll water it probably three times a week for three hours each in order to get that one inch of rain that the garden needs because it's much better for your plants to water for a longer amount of time less often than to water every day for 30 minutes or an hour it's so much better for your plants those roots want to go deep down in the soil where it's cool where all the minerals and the nutrients are and by watering less often for longer amounts of time it's allowing the water to go deep down into the ground where your roots want it and where they need it so that's kind of the basic basics of why we use drip tape irrigation and why we think it's a great system so let's head on over into the shade because i want to show you guys everything that came in the box i just got a brand new irrigation system delivered from growersolution.com now we've talked about them with you guys in the past it's where we order a ton of our garden stuff and where we bought our greenhouses great company we just got a brand new system delivered to us i want to show you all the different components before we actually head out into the garden and start setting it up all right i have all of the parts of our drip irrigation system here so you guys can see them i'm going to go over each part one at a time now there really aren't a lot of parts it's a pretty easy system anybody can set it up it may seem a little confusing at first but once you've set up one system you'll figure out that it's a breeze and you can do it every time you need to do it we keep expanding our gardens so i've set up a lot of these there's really two main parts to a drip irrigation system you have your main line tubing which is the tubing that's going to run the entire length of your garden and then you have your actual drip lines which are the lines that run down the rows down each row of plants the main line is a thicker material this is pretty heavy duty this is what's going to carry the water to each of the drip lines so you can see that this is half inch in diameter it's pretty heavy stuff this isn't real bendable but this is what you're going to use down the main part of your garden so i will show you that more when we get to the garden and then we have our actual drip tape the drip tape comes on a roll like this this is a thousand feet of drip tape and let's unwrap this a little bit and i'll show you guys exactly what it looks like now you may be wondering for those of you who have never used drip tape what the difference between drip tape and just like drip tubing that you can buy at home depot or lowe's or something like that is the main difference is that drip tape runs off a much lower psi which means that you don't need so much water pressure to water a really big area now because of the fact that you don't need a lot of water pressure in order to run a large area of drip tape you can run it off a gravity fed system if you live off grid if you're in a situation where you don't can't run a hose over to where you want your garden you could actually run this off of a gravity-fed system as long as you can get 15 psi you can run one of these systems so here's what the actual drip tape looks like you can see it's actually a pretty thin material and basically your connectors are going to go on here this is going to connect to your main line and then you can see every 12 inches along this piece of drip tape there is a little emitter and that's where your water is going to come out so when you run this in your garden that's where your water is going to come out and it's going to water very efficiently right at the ground level all right so other than your mainline tubing and your drip tubing there's really only a couple other parts it may seem a little overwhelming or intimidating when you get this bag in the mail and it's got all of these different parts in it but really there's only about three or four other parts there's just a lot of each one so the first thing you're going to get is a way to connect your main line tubing to a garden hose so that you can actually get water to the garden that looks like this basically this is just a connector that's going to go onto the end of your main line you're going to tighten this down and then you can attach a garden hose right to your mainline tubing then of course you need some way to plug up the other end of the main line that's what this piece is for it's basically the same type of piece except it's got a solid end so that however long your garden is you can cut your main line put this at the other end and now you've got just a solid tube that won't leak now you also need a way to connect your drip tubes off of your main line because these ultimately are going to run off of your main line kind of like this and the way that you do that is with these little adapters right here these are actually going to go into the main line and then your drip tube is going to connect to each one these actually have a little on and off switch right on each one so if you don't want to water every row of your garden for the same amount of time you can turn some off if you want to i'll be honest though in the past we've never had these kind with a little valve ours always ran at once and to be honest we always water our garden everything in the garden the same amount of time anyway so it doesn't really matter a whole lot but this may be nice to have at some point if some plants are done and you want to let them die off but you want to keep watering others you don't have to water the whole garden so this is going to be here and then you're going to have a tool that looks like this to actually make the holes to put that in all of this will make a lot more sense when we get out to the garden i'm just trying to give you guys a real quick overview here and then the final thing that you're going to get is one of these and this is a pressure reducer so if you live in town or your well has a lot of pressure it's going to be way too much pressure for a drip system like this so this is actually going to screw on like this and then your garden hose is going to attach and then this will actually reduce the water pressure down to the 15 psi that you want for your drip system so very simple system and it'll make a lot more sense when we get out to the garden so let's head over that way now so we can actually get started installing it all right well we're in the garden you can see all of our plants are planted everything is actually doing really well everything we planted by seed is pretty much up except for a couple things that we had to replant but everything is looking great we've been getting plenty of rain so we're not gonna really need the water yet but by this weekend we're gonna need the water so we're gonna try to get this entire system set up today so when we need it it's all ready to go so again we're going to start with our main line now this is going to run this entire length of the garden this way and we're going to run it basically right along even with these t posts along are the beginning of our rows all right so the first thing that we need to do is connect this connector i showed this to you earlier this is so that we can attach the garden hose to the main line now these are very easy to connect what you do is there's this part right here that tightens you want to make sure that that is all the way up so that you have as much of this sticking out as you can then this is going to just push onto the tube and then that piece there is going to unscrew it's kind of a reverse thread and it's going to actually go back over the piece of main line just like that and that tightens that on real nice and strong so you'll have a good waterproof seal so now i'm going to unroll this all the way the length of the garden and then we're just going to use some of our landscape staples the same stuff that we same staples that we use to hold down the weed fabric we're going to use that to hold this where we want it in place now that we have the main line just kind of loosely rolled out i'm going to attach this first edge here now you may be wondering why i'm outside of the garden well sarah did something a little different this year and she had me just till a little strat stretch right here only about a foot and a half wide right outside of the garden where she planted just a bunch of extra flower seeds that she had and actually a lot of them were starting to come up so we decided that as long as we're adding the drip system we might as well add a piece of drip tape right down the middle those flowers as well so what we're going to do is we're going to start this out here and i'm going to put these staples in just to hold this in place and right now i'm going to put these staples all the way at this end so that in a minute we can go down to the other end and actually kind of pull this tight to make it nice and straight so let's go down there and do that now and then we'll cut it and put our end on the other side all right so i'm going to pull this into place even with our t-posts there and i'm going to look where i know we're going to have our last row of plants and we want it to be just a little bit longer than that and this looks good so we'll go ahead and we'll cut this here and we'll put an end on here to terminate this at this end now this even the main line even though it's thicker than the drip tape still cuts pretty easily you just cut it with a regular kitchen scissors so don't need any fancy tools which is good we've got this measured out here now we're going to put again this is the this is the connector that i showed you earlier that has a solid cap on the end and that goes on just like the one we put on a little while ago goes on it just pushes on and then that tightens down over the tube and then that's on now that we've got that pulled tight where we want it we'll attach this end with some staples as well there we go now we have our main line run in a nice straight line right at the beginning of our rows we can go back and we can start adding the actual drip tape to start watering the garden it's time to get started installing our first piece of the actual drip tape we need a couple things for this step you need one of these tools for actually making a hole in your main line and then you need one of these adapters for attaching the drip tape to the main line so you can see on the end of this adapter there's this little nub right here this is what's going to actually stick into the main line this tool here has a point on it and it's actually going to poke a hole through the main line and take out a little piece of the plastic so that you can push this in and make a nice tight seal so let me show you how that looks like down here on the main line so you're gonna figure out where you want your piece of drip tape to start then you're going to take your tool here and you're just going to poke a hole into the main line you can see that that made a nice hole right there and then we're going to take our valve here we're going to push that on and just like that we're ready to add our first piece of drip tape now that may seem kind of scary to some of you if you've never done this before or if you put the hole in the wrong spot well in every kit that you order you get a little bag of these right here these are called goof plugs and what these are is just a little plug that if you happen to make a hole in the wrong spot or you change your mind later on or maybe next year your roads aren't in exactly the same spots and you want to plug things up you can use one of these goof plugs you can put that in the main line as a plug and then it'll cap that off so that you can move or you can fix a mistake that you made so you get some of these every year if you're like me hopefully you won't make you know this many mistakes each year you'll end up with a bunch of extras of these over time but they really do come in handy because it seems like every year your rows might move just a little bit and you need to you know make some adjustments that's one thing we get a lot of questions about with this type of system is you know how long is the life span on this can i use it year after year um the main line and all of the valves and stuff i mean they'll last a long time i mean we're still on the first set in our other gardens so um you know you're talking five plus years of using the same pieces the actual drip tape itself they do recommend that you replace that every you know three to four years it kind of depends on you know how much you're using it and really the biggest thing is how hard your water is because the little emitters on here will get built up with kind of stone and stuff a hard water deposits after a while and then you do want to replace those time to put on our first piece of drip tape now there's a few questions that we get about this every single year i'll try to address those quickly the first is do the emitters to the actual spots where the water come out do they have to go up or down the emitters should always go up you want to be able to see the water come out and run off the edge so you always want to make sure that the emitters go up the other thing is a lot of people will argue that it's better to put your entire drip system underneath your weed fabric it's really personal choice we prefer to put it on top of the weed fabric we've had no problem it runs so slow and the in the weed fabric has such good water penetration that it waters your plants just fine and we feel like by having on on top of the weed fabric that if there's a problem with the system you can see it early because you can actually see the drip system or if it's underneath there may be a problem for a while before you actually notice what's going on so we have it on top but again it's personal choice and then there is a third question that we always get and that is do the holes do your emitters have to line up exactly with your plants well no they don't for instance we plant our tomatoes every 18 inches these are every 12 inches apart they're never going to line up on every one that is why you need to run your drip system long enough that it actually waters the entire garden the goal should be here when we're done and we're running the system that it's going to water not only this row where we have it but halfway over to this next row and then this one here will water this row and halfway over here and so you want to run it so that your entire garden gets watered not just right next to the plants so that's why we need to run it as long as we do so the entire garden gets watered all right we're going to hook this piece up and then i'm going to roll it down the row and show you how to cut it and make the end nice and tight and these adapters work exactly the same way our other ones did that we just put on you're gonna push your actual piece of drip tape on there then you're gonna unscrew this over the piece of drip tape and you can see that that makes a nice tight seal all right we've got this all rolled out you can see here is the end of our row where our t-post is what i'm going to do is i'm going to look for where the nearest emitter is here and i'm going to cut just on the inside of that so we cut that off now we have a pretty long piece here with no emitter on it at all now that we have that cut we need to terminate the end of this or the water will just run right out the end of the piece of drip tape you get these little things that come with your kit you're going to slide that on to your piece of drip tape and you're going to slide it up pretty far there's an end here that has a smaller slit and then this end has a little as a bigger hole right there so you're going to slide that up now we're going to fill fold this over a couple times just like this and then that's going to slide back down over the end and that makes a nice tight water sealed end there and now we can just secure that in place with a staple and that is running nice and straight down our row we're going to pull a little bit of pressure on our piece of drip tape so it's a nice straight line down our row of tomatoes here we're going to put this in like that holds it nice and tight now what i'm going to do is just go down this row and just put a couple staples along the row not real tight because you don't want to you know make a kink in your hose but just so that it stays kind of close to the plants and makes a nice straight line even when we turn the water on then we're just going to do the same for every row that we have planted in the garden and then it'll be ready to test the system out [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] all right we've got our tire drip system set up it took us probably about an hour to set up the entire thing so really not bad at all only bad part is how hot it is out today it's like i said about 90 degrees and really humid because of all the rain we've been getting anyway we're just gonna keep moving on we've got work to do next thing we're going to do is install our pressure regulator on the end of our drip system now again this is going to take whatever pressure you have coming out of your garden hose and it's going to reduce it down to 15 psi which is what's recommended for the drip tape so nothing really to installing this we're just gonna go to the end of our drip tape here and just screws on like a garden hose would just like that and it tells you you know the direction of the flow and then we've got our garden hose we're just going to attach that here as well now one thing i did want to talk to you guys about a little bit because i know it can be kind of annoying to some people but all of these fittings like where the the drip tape goes into the main line uh all of this stuff you know these are just push-in fittings they're never gonna be a hundred percent water tight so you may see some drips of water coming out where you push that piece into the main line uh i mean you may see even though you have your piece of drip tape nice and straight right now once you turn the water on it gets a little crooked none of that really matters you guys if there's a little water dripping out of here it's a drip irrigation system don't worry about it unless water is pouring out or water is you know coming out so fast that it's changing the pressure and it's no longer watering the entire garden then that's a different story but if it's just a few drips of water coming out where you know you pushed a piece together like this you guys just don't worry about it it's not gonna hurt a thing all right we're gonna turn this on and you're going to hear the water run it's going to go through the entire system now we do need to check this for leaks but it's going to take a while for this entire system to to fill up with water so i'm going to leave this on for about a half hour and then we're going to come out and check for any big problems so the drip system has been running for about 30 minutes now and there are no major problems no big leaks no anything like that so that is a very good thing i wanted to start by showing you guys out here outside the garden in that flower in that row of flowers that sarah planted because you can see better where there's no weed fabric kind of how the drip system works because you can see it on the ground here so you can see you know where each of the emitters is and how much water is coming out and basically you're what you're trying to do is you're you know let this water until these circles get big enough that everything's connected and and you know as wide as your rows are so again we're gonna let this run for probably about three hours each time we run it and we'll try to do that especially during hot weather when there's no rain about three times a week but uh again i'll link to that article so you guys can figure out how much you'll need to run your own drip system based on the equipment that you have let's head inside the garden so you can see what it looks like with the woven ground cover all right so here we are in our row of beans and you can see the drip system running on top of the woven weed fabric now you can see that as it runs out it gets on top of the woven weed fabric a lot of it runs right through now some of it will occasionally you know run on top of the woven weed fabric and then find a hole to go through and go in that way it doesn't let it through as fast as it would if you just had open ground but i'm telling you guys after using this now the two of these in conjunction for several years that your plants are getting all the water that they need so even though you may see in some low spots a little puddle where it kind of ran to or you might see you know a little trail of water running it's just fine it's still going through the weed fabric just the way that it's supposed to and your plants are going to do great so our system is all set up i'm excited to finally have a way to water on these days that we're not getting rain again and it looks like the plants are going to love it and love this great water well that is another job well done here on the homestead we're so happy that our garden is to off to a great start and this drip system will definitely help it stay that way all summer long you guys we hope you enjoyed learning how to use one of these drip irrigation systems if you did enjoy watching the video give us a thumbs up make sure that you hit the subscribe button so that you're notified of all of our upcoming videos and as always the best way that you can help us here on the homestead is just to share our videos on your social media until next time thank you so much for stopping by our homestead take care and god bless god bless

Channel: Living Traditions Homestead

Views: 86,043

Rating: 4.9791689 out of 5

Keywords: Living Traditions Homestead, Missouri, Ozark's, homesteading, Ozarks, self-sufficient, homesteaders, unjobbing

Id: znrv5vEz4Ik

Length: 27min 44sec (1664 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 12 2021