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.
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.
- 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.
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.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.
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?
Thats usually a solenoid valve. It basically lets your main box control which sprinkler zone is turned on or off.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.
Now I feel like an archeologist digging up something interesting...
Further bulletins as events warrant.
And I must spread some rep around, first.Thats usually a solenoid valve. It basically lets your main box control which sprinkler zone is turned on or off.
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.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.
Train them to go elsewhere.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.