Home Improvement
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Selix
Lord Nagafen Raider
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Hey everyone. I could use some help deciding on an irrigation system to use in my vegetable garden this year. I've included a shitty MS paint picture of my garden but it should help visualize the area. My previous experience was to just run a soaker hose through my garden in one long loop and that worked pretty well but this year we are doing 7 4'x8' raised beds and would like to hear if anyone has any advice.
I have looked at drip tape, drip lines and soaker hoses but I have only ever tried soaker hoses before. The new thing I will be doing in this garden is running the hose underground in between the beds which means I will have to cut the hose (or tape or pipe or whatever) and use normal hose for the sections underground. This is where my project gets complicated. I can run the water line to come up anywhere in the grey area which would make it easy to start a soaker hose from the middle of the garden but I am not sure if that is the best solution to run and get good even dripping with all of the potential connections I would need to make. And also what would be the best pattern to use?
Of course I would probably need to make as many connections with any other system but I think dripline connections cost more then soaker connections and I don't know how will tape connections work.
So that is why I started looking at things like driplines and drip tape but now I just have more choices and less certainty.
Some useful info
I ran the 5 gallon test and came out to 5.5 gallons/minute.
The vertical columns (the grey walkway areas) are 3.5' to 4' wide.
The middle rows are 2' and 3' or so wide.
The vertical raised beds are actually touching and my shitty drawing skills are just shitty.
We are on clay which seemed to do well for our first tryout last year but this year in our raised beds we used a dirt mixture from a local company
"Mark's MixT is a composition of Mushroom Compost, Black Dirt, Peat Moss and Hardwood Fines. This composition is wonderful for tree planting, landscape beds and vegetable gardens. "
The water in our area is typically hard water drawn from the city.
So any vegetable gardeners out there who can offer some help? It would be much appreciated.
Garden in Progress. Garden is done working on digging the trench for the french drain now. Gogo pickaxe.
I have looked at drip tape, drip lines and soaker hoses but I have only ever tried soaker hoses before. The new thing I will be doing in this garden is running the hose underground in between the beds which means I will have to cut the hose (or tape or pipe or whatever) and use normal hose for the sections underground. This is where my project gets complicated. I can run the water line to come up anywhere in the grey area which would make it easy to start a soaker hose from the middle of the garden but I am not sure if that is the best solution to run and get good even dripping with all of the potential connections I would need to make. And also what would be the best pattern to use?
Of course I would probably need to make as many connections with any other system but I think dripline connections cost more then soaker connections and I don't know how will tape connections work.
So that is why I started looking at things like driplines and drip tape but now I just have more choices and less certainty.
Some useful info
I ran the 5 gallon test and came out to 5.5 gallons/minute.
The vertical columns (the grey walkway areas) are 3.5' to 4' wide.
The middle rows are 2' and 3' or so wide.
The vertical raised beds are actually touching and my shitty drawing skills are just shitty.
We are on clay which seemed to do well for our first tryout last year but this year in our raised beds we used a dirt mixture from a local company
"Mark's MixT is a composition of Mushroom Compost, Black Dirt, Peat Moss and Hardwood Fines. This composition is wonderful for tree planting, landscape beds and vegetable gardens. "
The water in our area is typically hard water drawn from the city.
So any vegetable gardeners out there who can offer some help? It would be much appreciated.
Garden in Progress. Garden is done working on digging the trench for the french drain now. Gogo pickaxe.
ToeMissile
Pronouns: zie/zhem/zer
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It's going to be a pain to get to the 'backsides' of those boxes, the ones next the the fences. I don't have much experience w/ gardening except helping my parents out when I was a kid, but I came across this not too long ago, and was pretty intrigued:Sub-irrigated Raised Beds And Planter Boxes. Obviously it'd need to be adjusted somewhat for your purposes, but seems like something worth considering.
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I'd use the irrigation system stuff (mister sprinkler or some shit) from lowes. It's easy to work with, cheap, and you can customize it. You could literally come off your water faucet, bury the flexible pipe, come up at a bed, circle within the bed and have either soakers or sprayers water your crop, then have the hose go back underground and surface around the next bed, rinse and repeat. I did this for my front yard because I wanted my shrubs to get plenty of water so they can be healthy and hopefully grow a bit quicker. You could even plug a simple $30 timer to it and your entire garden could be watered automatically each day.
For coming out of the ground and going into the bed, you can use couplers and joints to make it look really nice, or if your just using 2x4s or whatever like it looks in your pic, just drill a small hall for the hose to go through. A million ways to do it, all will work. I agree with above guy saying the back row will be hard to work with. I did raised beds at old house and that would have been quite a pain. Also looks like your back beds are touching eachother to make a massive 16x4 bed. If you cut all the 8ft boards to 7 ft for all the beds you'd probably gain enough room with that layout to make them fit better.
For coming out of the ground and going into the bed, you can use couplers and joints to make it look really nice, or if your just using 2x4s or whatever like it looks in your pic, just drill a small hall for the hose to go through. A million ways to do it, all will work. I agree with above guy saying the back row will be hard to work with. I did raised beds at old house and that would have been quite a pain. Also looks like your back beds are touching eachother to make a massive 16x4 bed. If you cut all the 8ft boards to 7 ft for all the beds you'd probably gain enough room with that layout to make them fit better.
Erronius
Macho Ma'am
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I'd mentioned this back on FOH some time ago, but it's slowly getting worse. My laundry drain is tied to it's own greywater drain line, while the rest of the plumbing goes off towards the septic. At the moment whenever we do a load of laundry someone has to literally be standing there whenever it drains the washing machine as you'll be able to hear the water start backing up, and if the load size is set to a large load, it will overload onto the laundry room floor. With a medium load, sometimes it will back up and sometimes it wont, but even when it doesn't you can hear it getting close, and occasionally you wont be fast enough and it will overflow before you can turn the laundry machine off.
Originally we thought it might just be cat hair, especially since we first noticed it backing up after we had washed a cat bed (we vacuumed it but there was still a lot of hair that washed out) but that doesn't make much sense to me. It looks to be a 2" drain line and I can't imagine cat hair doing that on its own. I'm guessing that if anything we have roots in the line and that the cat hair just made it worse, but I'm getting tired of pouring every flavor of drain cleaner I can find down it for increasingly negligible results.
What I want to do is to rent an electric sewer snake and send it down that line, which iirc is supposed to be 40'-50' long or thereabouts, and rip out whatever the fuck is down there (guessing roots). My problem is that the cleanout is eye level to me where it goes through the basement wall, so around 6ft. Everyone I've talked to, and online guides, have suggested that you don't want to have for than 2-3 feet of snake cable between the machine itself and the drain or cleanout; being that this access is 6' up, depending on how I set it up on the floor I'm afraid I'll end up with 6'-8' (or more) of sewer snake flapping around me when/if it gets a bit of tension on it. I'm also afraid that due to the angles that I might break the pipe itself if I'm turning the snake and it gets too much tension on it. The options I've thought of so far include:
I thought about trying one of those small ones that is powered by a cordless drill (I could just hold it up at the cleanout), but my gut feeling is that if we do have tree roots that it wont be enough.
Originally we thought it might just be cat hair, especially since we first noticed it backing up after we had washed a cat bed (we vacuumed it but there was still a lot of hair that washed out) but that doesn't make much sense to me. It looks to be a 2" drain line and I can't imagine cat hair doing that on its own. I'm guessing that if anything we have roots in the line and that the cat hair just made it worse, but I'm getting tired of pouring every flavor of drain cleaner I can find down it for increasingly negligible results.
What I want to do is to rent an electric sewer snake and send it down that line, which iirc is supposed to be 40'-50' long or thereabouts, and rip out whatever the fuck is down there (guessing roots). My problem is that the cleanout is eye level to me where it goes through the basement wall, so around 6ft. Everyone I've talked to, and online guides, have suggested that you don't want to have for than 2-3 feet of snake cable between the machine itself and the drain or cleanout; being that this access is 6' up, depending on how I set it up on the floor I'm afraid I'll end up with 6'-8' (or more) of sewer snake flapping around me when/if it gets a bit of tension on it. I'm also afraid that due to the angles that I might break the pipe itself if I'm turning the snake and it gets too much tension on it. The options I've thought of so far include:
- Set up some sort of stand to raise the machine up to the level of the access; the stairwell is a PITA to get anything up or down so scaffolding might be out (I don't hve a baker scaffold), and I don't really want to buy lumber to make something
- Figure out a way to bolt the machine upside-down on the ceiling to the floor joists, perhaps with conduit straps or something
- Say "fuck it" and try operating it with a ton of free slack and see what happens
- dig down on the outside basement wall, cut the pipe, and send the snake down there. Snake it out with no fucks given, then repair the pipe afterwards. but....digging sucks balls.
- Find some sort of 2" PVC male threaded fitting that will thread into where the cleanout plug screws in, add a 45 degree fitting and 6' of 2" pipe, and have someone stand and hold that pipe while I operate the snake so it acts as a sort of raceway for the snake cable up to the cleanout.
I thought about trying one of those small ones that is powered by a cordless drill (I could just hold it up at the cleanout), but my gut feeling is that if we do have tree roots that it wont be enough.
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If you want to keep it really simple, you could just get a good impulse sprinkler, and put it at about centre on a raised platform. Put it 3 feet up, and you'd get the whole garden with that. Easy to put on a timer, cheap to do, and will get everything watered.Hey everyone. I could use some help deciding on an irrigation system to use in my vegetable garden this year. I've included a shitty MS paint picture of my garden but it should help visualize the area. My previous experience was to just run a soaker hose through my garden in one long loop and that worked pretty well but this year we are doing 7 4'x8' raised beds and would like to hear if anyone has any advice.
I have looked at drip tape, drip lines and soaker hoses but I have only ever tried soaker hoses before. The new thing I will be doing in this garden is running the hose underground in between the beds which means I will have to cut the hose (or tape or pipe or whatever) and use normal hose for the sections underground. This is where my project gets complicated. I can run the water line to come up anywhere in the grey area which would make it easy to start a soaker hose from the middle of the garden but I am not sure if that is the best solution to run and get good even dripping with all of the potential connections I would need to make. And also what would be the best pattern to use?
Of course I would probably need to make as many connections with any other system but I think dripline connections cost more then soaker connections and I don't know how will tape connections work.
So that is why I started looking at things like driplines and drip tape but now I just have more choices and less certainty.
Some useful info
I ran the 5 gallon test and came out to 5.5 gallons/minute.
The vertical columns (the grey walkway areas) are 3.5' to 4' wide.
The middle rows are 2' and 3' or so wide.
The vertical raised beds are actually touching and my shitty drawing skills are just shitty.
We are on clay which seemed to do well for our first tryout last year but this year in our raised beds we used a dirt mixture from a local company
"Mark's MixT is a composition of Mushroom Compost, Black Dirt, Peat Moss and Hardwood Fines. This composition is wonderful for tree planting, landscape beds and vegetable gardens. "
The water in our area is typically hard water drawn from the city.
So any vegetable gardeners out there who can offer some help? It would be much appreciated.
Garden in Progress. Garden is done working on digging the trench for the french drain now. Gogo pickaxe.
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What I would do is get a 4-5 ft long section of 3-4 in white pvc tubing to run the snake through on the way to the clean out, and just have someone else hold it. Like you said. This should contain the snake so it does not break or break something else or slap you silly. It seems like the most sensible thing to do. I dotn think you actualy have to have it attached to your clean out, just have someone hold it to contain the snake.
Also, you would be surprised at the amount of lint and shit the washing machines spew out, and how easily this shit clogs up your drains. Especially if they are the older style cast iron type drains which have slag inside of them at the joints.
Get yourself a lint trap for your discharge hose. It costs like $3-4 per like 3 of them and they look like a metal sock which slips over the discharge hose and its held in place by a plastic zip tie. You wount believe the amount of lint the thing captures within a few weeks time.
I had the same problem in my old house. We used to have problems with our "main out" drain which the basement washer tub directly tied into. the problem was worse than yorus though because our basement would literally start filling up with sewage water when this happened. We used to have to do regular snake outs of this main drain every few years, like a regular maintenance, until one plumber told me to start using a lint trap. So I did and never had a problem for years after that.
Falstaff
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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This is what ours looks like... I still need to get a new one but this is what it looked like when we moved in.
When it's done with a big drain cycle and is pumping the residual out, it looks like a beating heart.
(sorry for the shitty pic, my iphone camera is all scuffed up)
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I get to spend the weekend getting my irrigation system up to snuff. It was installed about 30 years ago, and clearly no one has done a thing to it since. There are four spray heads that don't work, and one of them is because it is so close to the driveway (literally touching the cement) that someone drove on it a bit, and destroyed it. So, I'll have to move that a bit.
Also, the valve where you are supposed to blow it out for the winter is just screwed. It spent the last two months of last summer leaching water. It's buried at the moment, so I have no idea what it is going to look like. Anyone have experience? What should I expect when I dig it up? Are the replacement parts expensive?
Also, the valve where you are supposed to blow it out for the winter is just screwed. It spent the last two months of last summer leaching water. It's buried at the moment, so I have no idea what it is going to look like. Anyone have experience? What should I expect when I dig it up? Are the replacement parts expensive?
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Yeah, that's not the part I mean, I'm clearly not knowing what's going on underground. That part is right up beside the house. The part about which I am speaking is right up by the road. At first I thought it was just a break in a line, but it was leaking even when the system was shut off for days. I guess it'll just be a surprise when I dig up whatever it was that was leaking. I'm still hoping for a break in a line, as that's such an easy fix. When I pushed my hand into the mud, it felt like there was some kind of component there, and it's definitely related to the irrigation system, because as soon as I killed the water to it for the fall, the leaking stopped.Why is that valve buried? It should not be from the irrigation systems that I have seen. This is called the backflow preventer, right? It looks something like this?
Now I feel like an archeologist digging up something interesting...
Further bulletins as events warrant.
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Thats usually a solenoid valve. It basically lets your main box control which sprinkler zone is turned on or off.
Something like this, but obviously there is tons of different makes and models. So it might not look like that.
Also, it realy depends where they put these things. For instance on my dads new build, they put all the valves , all in a row, right by is house in a pit that is covered by some plywood. Nice and servicable. But in my house, and from the sounds of it yours, they put these fucking valves all over the place, and without some kind of map of your system you have no clue where they are. I know this because I put in a pool which I had to dig a portion of my yard to make it level and I found one of these things.
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And I must spread some rep around, first.
Odd, that I don't know more about irrigation systems. When I was landscaping, it just wasn't a thing in the areas where I worked. They don't look expensive, or hard to figure out. Thanks!
Jalynfane
Phank 2002
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I was going to suggest attaching a pvc coupling to each bed with soaker hose coming off it and the make a junction with a valve that you could manually direct water to each box, but that 3' high sprinkler that you put on a timer is likely the best route, it will certainly cover all that, like was suggested.
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Heh.
Finally finished all the bits and bobs on my study. I'll have pictures in a few days. Took a very bad "library" with horrible shelves, popcorn ceiling, and a 20 inch door and changed it to a wide open room with almost 200 linear feet of built in book shelves. I'm trying to upgrade my 70s house in ways appropriate to the house. What a stinking pain in the buttocks to stain/finish that much wood.
Selix
Lord Nagafen Raider
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Sigh nice ideas guys. Half of the drain was dug and was all wound up to go finish this weekend when the entire family got the stomach bug going around. Went through all 4 of us in order hitting me last and pretty hard on Saturday. Weekend gone.
Sigh.
Falstaff
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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For those of you who have dogs, is there anything you can put on your lawn in areas where the dog pees all the time? Our dog runs out our back door and almost always pees in the same general area and I noticed how badly "burned" or dead it is in some of those spots when I mowed yesterday.
Cutlery
Kill All the White People
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