Dirty Business: Irrigation

You can pick the best seed supplier.  You can buy the best plants.  You can take great care and do everything right when nursing the seeds and plants to get ready to go in the ground.  But, if you don’t irrigate properly, then you’re hosed.

Now, there are lots of different ways to irrigate a garden.  There’s the fully manual water can method, there’s the sprinkler method, there’s the dig-a-trench-from-a-nearby-body-of-water method, and a bunch of others I could list but don’t care to right now.  The method we’ve used for several years, and which has suited us well, is the drip irrigation method.  We prefer drip irrigation primarily because it is the most efficient and the least likely to result in diseases for the plants.  Using a sprinkler or a watering can gets lots of water on the plants themselves—which then makes them susceptible to various molds and diseases—plus not all of the water being applied actually ends up in the roots.  Using drip irrigation eliminates these two problems.  For our part, we use soaker hoses because they are relatively inexpensive and quite effective.  They’re not terribly durable—after a couple of seasons they will start to develop small holes which spray water in odd directions—but, ultimately, it’s the most cost-effective method for us at the moment. 

We don’t break out the soaker hoses until May at the earliest, to avoid any potential with freezing, which will tear them up.  So, our early watering is done with a water can or a spray nozzle on a regular hose.  When it is time to get the soaker hoses set up, the first thing we have to do is straighten them out.  They’ve spent the winter (or, if they’re new, time on the shelf) wrapped in a coil, which makes them hard to work with.  So, the hoses are released from their bonds and laid out as straight as possible on a warm, sunny day.

After several hours, to a full day later, they are much more pliable and easier to work with.  However, when they get laid out in the beds, they will still want to stick up off the ground in places.  So, we’ve developed a cheap and easy method of keeping them in place:  brackets cut from scraps of unused galvanized fencing.

These brackets do a good job of keeping the soaker hoses pinned to the ground.

Laying out the hoses is a pretty simple matter of running them along our beds in a zig-zag pattern to cover the whole bed.  I could just run them straight through the middle of the beds, but then the distribution of water at the edges would not be as good, so taking a little extra time now to set the hoses properly saves me a bunch of time (and extra water) later having to supplement in areas where the beds would still be dry.

As you can see, soaker hoses can also be daisy-chained so you can run them as far as your water pressure will allow.  Also, the hoses themselves come in varying lengths, up to 50 feet.  We run four 50-footers to cover all the beds that are next to each other.  I’ll have to run a separate system for our strawberries and asparagus beds.

One of these days, I want to get a couple of rain barrels set up so we don’t have to run the water from our taps.  But we keep running into the basic roadblock of where to place them so they’ll do what we need.  The most logical place for one barrel has no downspout, and the most logical place for another barrel doesn’t have enough space.  We’ll figure it out eventually.

Finally, I wanted to give you an update on the strawberries.  They are strong and doing quite well.  I’ve been pinching off the blossoms so the roots and plants can develop.  Haven’t seen any runners as of yet.