Drip System In The Garden

Here's the "Assembly" mounted on the exterior wall of the greenhouse. The old "Y" Hose Fitting at the left side of the Assembly needs to be replaced. It leaks. That's okay; it's so old I don't even remember where it came from. I think maybe I just found it left behind somewhere I once lived. Now I know why it was left behind.

Also, it's hard to see in the photo, but I've put wooden standoffs between the Assembly and the greenhouse. This lets air get around the Assembly so things can dry out. I'm also hoping that it'll make it easier to remove the Assembly in advance of winter freezes should that become necessary.

In the photo to the right, you can see some of the drip tubes. This is near the "head end" of the drip system. These are half-inch (roughly) drip tubes w/ in-line emitters. I think they're ideal for vegetables planted in rows.

I didn't happen to take a photo of the head of the drips system. I've used a collection of T's in a solid header pipe to feed the laterals that you can see in the photo. The header pipe is fed by short garden hose that goes under the circum-garden path.

In the photo below, you can see the terminated ends of several of the drip tubes. These in-line emitter tubes have built in pressure regulation. If you supply them with water within their spec'd pressure range, all the built-in emitters drip at their spec'd flow rate. That's 0.5 GPH for my system.

You might notice that the spaces between the rows aren't constant. That's because I decided to put some paths in the garden area. I'll probably stake cardboard down in those areas to keep the soil from being compacted too much.

The drip lines, both the header and the laterals, are held in place with some little hold-downs I made from old wire coat hangers. I cut each hanger into four, roughly equal pieces and bent each piece around a scrap of 1/2" PVC tube. It made for a nice, smooth bend and I think the hold downs will work until the tubing gets warm and used to being laid out in straight rows.

All-in-all, the drip system went together pretty easily. I'm very happy with the parts I got at Dripworks.com. Unfortunately when I placed my order I forgot that I'd need elbows (instead of T's) at the first and last laterals. Also, I decided that I wanted to have twelve laterals instead of ten, so I needed two elbows and two terminators.

I thought it would be fine to use whatever I could find at the local hardware store for these last bits. It'd save ordering and waiting, etc.

Wrong!

The only fittings that leak in the whole drip array are the compression fittings I bought at the local store. I think that they were old and not particularly good quality. Or maybe I didn't use them right... but how can you not?! Once the tube is shoved, wiggled, twisted, cursed into the compression fitting, it's supposed to Just Work, Darnit!

But they leak, and I guess that's just the way it is. Anyway, I'll order the four fittings from Dripworks tomorrow and they'll be here soon, so it's not a huge deal. Lesson learned.

Now I need to figure out the best mulching for the vegetable garden. It's really exciting - even with a few leaks at the periphery - to turn the valve and see all the emitters start to do their thing. It's easy to imagine how this system coupled with heavy mulching will improve yields and reduce irrigation needs.

If the theory is borne out in practice, it's going to be a great garden this year!

Not A Ray-gun

Well, today, I built the "Assembly" for our drip irrigation system. It looks a little like something that, with the proper paint, might work on the set of Deep Space 9.

Water flow is right to left in this photo.

My supply line is a 1/2" pipe, but the Assembly is built around 3/4" components. I chose the 4" long, 3/4" nipple so I'd have something I could brace against the wall of the greenhouse. The next thing to the left is an in-line ball valve (in the photo the handle is removed). Then the small-ish, black thing is a vacuum breaker. That's followed by some adaptors sandwiching a swivel hose coupling. I included the coupling so I'll be able to remove the fancy (i.e. expensive) downstream bits during the winter.

Next downstream from the swivel hose connector is a check valve. The combination of the vacuum breaker and the check valve prevent any siphoning of water out of the drip system and back into the supply (ick).

After the check valve you can see a filter. The bottom, dangly part can unscrew so the stainless steel filter can be removed for cleaning. Next there's a pressure regulator. That brings the pressure feeding the drip lines to 30 PSI (which is within spec for the drip tubing I'm using). Finally, you can see a "Y" valve with individual shutoffs so I can use the assembly to drive two separate garden areas.

Today I got the upstream bits -- up to and including the swivel hose fitting -- connected to the water supply and fastened securely to the outside wall of the greenhouse. I've put the handle back on the ball valve. No leaks on this part at all. The braces work superbly so there should be no strain on the plastic supply line to the greenhouse.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I got most of the Assembly components from a place called DripWorks.com. Their prices were good (very good in some cases) for the specialty bits. The standard pipe fittings were competitively priced at the local hardware store. The stuff from DripWorks arrived promptly.

Next I need to brace the rest of the bits and then start on the actual drip array. I'll probably work on that tomorrow.

Last Day of Sixth Decade

Not such a big deal really. Happens all the time (to other people). This is the first time I remember it happening to me, though.

Our options are limited. So far this isn't too bad.

Scratch Another Project Off the List

Spring bangs its drum to wake up the sun.

Angel & I spent hours outdoors today. She focused on spring cleanup of flower beds. The various weeds, local and exotic, encroach on plantings during the mild, wet winters. As a result of her ministrations, areas that were overgrown now look open. The flowers and shrubs have room to grow. The rhodedendrons between our house and the neighbors to the west look especially pretty.

Last year I rented a shredder/chipper to turn vast amounts of bark into mulch. It was a hot, messy, exhausting job, but I did end up with a large pile of finely shredded bark.

Before the winter, as an experiment, I piled a fair amount of that shredded bark atop some landscape fabric on the south side of the house. Storms came. Wind blew hard. The shredded bark moved around a little, but not too much. Some weeds poked up through the fabric, but not too many. Thus, the experiment indicates my homemade bark will stay put and perform well as mulch.

So today, I completed a big, mulched border beneath the basement windows on the south and east sides of the house. The area is four feet wide on the south side and three feet wide on the east side. It's, oh I don't know, forty or fifty feet long.

I edged it with rocks... volleyball-sized down to fist size. That holds down the fabric at the boundaries and helps contain the mulch. It looks great, and now when the rains come, water will not splash on the stucco.

I have a lot of rocks. You may remember that I've been hauling rocks to a staging area near our big firewood stacks. These rocks range in size from gravel to boulders too heavy to move by myself. It's great fun to use these in landscape projects. It's very satisfying to use bark that I shredded for mulch. The end result is attractive and the only part that we purchased is the landscape fabric.

I also "did the compost" and picked up more rocks from various parts of the property. Need to keep my rock supply up. Who knows? Maybe someday I'll build a Zen rock garden. Or not.

Knees ache. Elbows ache, but the property took a step up in landscape dimension.

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.

Guarantee

...from the You Can't Just Make this Stuff Up department...

My friend D borrowed my tree pruners. They're very old. I don't know how old. They belonged to my dad. A year or so after Dad died (roughly ten years ago) I found them in his garage and thought, "I can use those." They were beat up then but they worked.

Angel and I hauled the pruners to the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains when we moved there. We hauled the pruners to the edge of the continent when we moved to the 48th parallel. They leaned against some shelves in our garage, and like I said, D borrowed them. Last week. He's got some really nice (and very tall) fruit trees, and this is pruning time... past pruning time for some trees, even.

So D was pruning away happily. Then he stopped to speak for a moment to his elderly neighbor. He laid the pruners on elderly neighbor's driveway. Then he was interrupted by a phone call. Then, somewhat suddenly, someone came to elderly neighbor's house in a car. That someone hurried into the driveway and drove over my pruners. Long extension pole bent into pretzel-hood. Saw crooked. Loppers out of whack.

Now these are Sears Craftsman pruners. D, being a good guy, wanted to buy me a new set to replace the ones that had so badly lost their fight with a motor vehicle. He called Sears. The nearest Sears is in the next town over... oh, about forty minutes away in good weather. The conversation went roughly as follows:

"Hi. I'm calling from the village at the edge of the continent. Do you carry 12 foot tree pruners?"

"Hi. No, sorry, we only carry the 14 foot model now."

"Oh. Well, okay. My old 12 footers were run over by a car. If you have a 14 foot model in stock, I'll drive over and pick one up."

"Okay. That's fine, but... are these Craftsman tree pruners?"

"Yes, they are."

"You said they're old. Can they still be identified as Craftsman tree pruners?"

"Well, yes, they can."

"Then bring the pruners over and we'll swap them out. That's the Craftsman guarantee. If it fails any time for any reason, we replace it. Even if you run over it with a car."

My friend D did just that. Now the Old Amigo has a new set of pruners. I like that guarantee. I understand that Sears stock is up lately. Perhaps there is some corporate karma involved.

I'd like to think so.

Garden Prep

Yesterday I spread (roughly) a cubic yard of freshly-cooked compost over our main garden area. Then I turned over the whole plot - about 350 square feet. This upended the winter rye cover crop. The soil looks good; although there is quite a bit of variation. Some areas are slightly more sandy and other areas have more of a heavy, clay-like texture.

According to the Pacific Northwest Garden Guide, I should now be working on getting the soil warmed up. I should also do something to keep the spring rains off the garden. The soil, after all, should be moist. Right now it is heavy and soggy. Our forecast calls for four days of sun, however, so by Sunday, things should be good!

Since we're planning to move to a drip irrigation system for (at least) the main garden, my next project involves bringing a hose bib out through the wall of the greenhouse. The Old Amigo is a tad nervous about tackling the plumbing, but the line to the greenhouse has its own shutoff. That at least will prevent serious disruption to the main water supply.

Oh, and I picked up a copy of an excellent book on drip irrigation. It's called (remarkably enough) Drip Irrigation for Every Landscape and All Climates. The author is Robert Kourik. I ordered my copy from Barnes & Noble.