Irrigating My Vegetable Garden

It is that time of the year when my vegetable garden is getting into full swing. All of my warm-season veggies are planted and beginning to grow. It does come with a certain amount of time needed to keep it watered enough so the plants will grow and the seedlings don't dry out. Hand watering is a form of therapy for me, and it allows me a way to monitor the garden more closely every day, but like many other people, the time I can put into watering the garden is limited. Also, although watering the garden is my "thing" it is not necessarily what my husband or house sitter wants to do when I (or we) go on vacation.

So, last year, in order to save some time, and to eliminate the need to pay someone to water for me when I am away, I decided to install an automatic watering system that is water efficient and easy to use. There are so many products on the market - in stores and online. There are drip irrigation kits, and the materials to create your own design. There are also soaker hoses - just the hoses, or kits where you can customize your system to whatever configuration you want. Each of them has its own merits and flaws, which leaves it up to the user on what they want to work with.

I was looking for a system that was easy and quick to install with minimal tools, and something that only watered the root zones of the plants to minimize water usage. I ended up choosing a customizable soaker hose kit that I got from Gardener's Supply Company online - www.gardeners.com - called Snip-n-Drip and the only tool required is a pair of scissors. They offer these kits for raised beds, garden rows, landscape beds, and container gardens. I got the one for row gardens even though I am using it on my raised beds. I also purchased kits for my container plants, too.

Inside the box are 25 feet of half-inch garden hose, 100 feet of half-inch soaker hose, three 3-way connectors, one single connector, one faucet adapter, and four end caps. This is enough for about four six-by-four raised beds or four rows at 25-feet long. I purchased four kits to adequately cover my 14 raised beds. It took me less than half a day to install the system to all of the beds. The raised bed kits have little corner adapters to keep the garden hose portion running along the ends of the beds, down the sides, and at ground level between beds. Since I chose to get the row-garden kits, I have to step over the hoses that are between the beds, which saved a little bit of cash.

I ran the hoses down the length of the beds. At each bed, I cut the hose with a pair of scissors and attached a three-way connector - garden hose attached to two of the connectors and soaker hose to the third. I used about 25 feet of soaker hose per bed and curved it around to make sure each plant would get watered. At the end of each soaker hose section I installed an end cap. To help keep the soaker hose lying flat, I used some wire hook stakes that I picked up at Orchard Supply Hardware. The final bed got a single connector from the garden hose to the soaker hose. The beginning end of the garden hose got a faucet/hose adapter so that I could attach it to the end of a hose that ran up to the faucet at the house. I have two sections of raised beds, so each section got its own irrigation system. To make it even easier, I attached the hoses to a two-outlet faucet timer so that my newly installed watering systems could turn themselves on and off.

There are many different timers on the market and over the years I have tried out many of them. For the most part, they were difficult to program ... that is until I discovered the Orbit faucet timer at Lowes. It is so easy to use, and is available in either one or two outlet versions. They use two AA batteries, which usually last the entire summer season. I have been using them for a few years now to operate my drip irrigation system that waters all of my trees and shrubs. If is getting a little late in the season, I usually change the batteries if I am going away to eliminate any potential problems for the house sitter. When winter comes, I just remove them from the faucet and store them in the garage to keep them from freezing.

The system has been operating for a year now and I am very happy with how it works, and the extra time it gives me to take care of other obligations when I need to. The only modification I made was to split each of the garden areas into two zones each because the water was not making it to the very end section in sufficient amounts.