Drip Components Ordered

Well, after futzing with the water supply in the greenhouse for a few days, I think I've got a hose bib and a "T" pushed through the wall of the greenhouse. There's a slight drip -- a couple of them actually -- in some of the connections between dissimilar materials (metal-to-plastic) but according to the USGS estimate of one drip = a quarter milliliter, that only amounts to about 12 gallons per year. Actually it's about 9 gallons per year because I shut the water to the greenhouse off from mid Nov through mid Feb.

I put a yoghurt container beneath the worst offender (less than a third of a drip per minute) and will use that to water plants in the greenhouse. Actually I'm hoping that there will be enough minerals in the water to plug these tiny gaps over the coming months. I've seen that happen.

I'll connect a drip irrigation "assembly" (vacuum breaker + check valve + filter + pressure regulator + assorted transition fittings and an in-line valve or two) to the T that I've brought to the outside of the greenhouse. The assembly will drive a header that in turn feeds ten "laterals" of drip tubing w/ in-line emitters. Each emitter is 1/2 a gallon per hour. Each lateral will be about 22 feet long (i.e. 11 gallons per hour per lateral). So that means the upper garden drip system will output 110 GPH. The header tubing can supply 480 GPH. The drip tubing can operate at pressures of 10 - 50 psi. The pressure regulator I picked has an output value of 30 psi.

In other words, the Old Amigo thinks he'll neither parch nor explode his drip system when he turns the water on.

I think an hour every other day will probably suffice for a well-mulched garden. That works out to 1650 gallons per month, roughly. I hope I can keep the soil moist with less than that, but we'll see. This system has the virtue of being fairly easy to dismantle for garden winterization and spring cultivation.

I'm also putting a "Y" hose fitting on the output of the assembly so that I'll be able to feed another drip system in the lower vegetable garden, but I'll want to debug the main garden before I tackle that.

Today I ordered most of my connectors and fittings from http://dripworks.com/ (recommended by an organic farmer, whom I know slightly, down in Chimicum).

The guy at dripworks seemed knowledgeable and "into" it. Said I should get my stuff early next week. I'll have to buy a few other items from the local hardware store, but that's okay. For simple, basic plumbing bits, the local guys are actually pretty competitive. They were more than 2x the cost of the in-line emitter drip tubing, however, and that tubing represents more than half the cost of my drip system (including the lower garden).

That's the garden story... for today anyway.