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water Drip irrigation

SadisticPeppers

SadisticPeppers

eXtreme Business
Seeing as my move to my parents' house in Jupiter is a sure thing, and my mom wants me to grow my peppers in the backyard almost more than I want to, I figured it'd be better to ask sooner rather than later about setting up a drip irrigation system, and if anyone has experience setting these up, and can impart advice, etc.

That being said, I'll pretty much need to set it up from scratch, and was wondering a few things. First off, a search on Google, Home Depot, Lowes, etc., yielded several brand names, starter kits, so I was wondering if there was a particular brand to go with or avoid, or if it was better just to do a DIY setup.

And if I do go with the DIY setup, what would be recommended. There's a working hose connector right there by the wall, so I'm good there. I know I need hoses, drippers, stakes, tubing, and T-shaped hookups. And here's the setup I wanna do. The backyard strip I wanna plant my peppers at is ~9-10 feet wide, so I wanna have three raised beds (each ~2 feet wide, ~45 feet long), running the length of the strip, with two rows of plants per raised bed. So I know I'll need at least three lines running, one per bed, with drip lines running from each side of the line to the plants. I also will almost certainly have a daily timer on the setup, so I won't have to worry about whether or not the peppers got their waiter every day, it'd just run for a few hours every day, and that'd be it. Beyond that, would I need anything else like a manifold, or anything like that?

Also, is there a way to have a resevoir of some kind in the system to include liquid nutes to the system, so that I can fertilize the plants and water them in one shot, or would I still have to give the plants nutes by hands?

All advice is welcome.
 
I would just make my own system. You can buy the 3/4 inch poly tubing by the 100 feet from HD, and the small spagetti tubing in rools as well. They sell the barbs that you can place anywhere you want on the 3/4 inch tube. Dpending on where you live and the critter situation, I would suggest putting the tubing on foot tall stands MOL so that the water filled tubing is in the air. Rabbits around here in central Florida will search out the water and chew right through that stuff to get the water. You can connect the three lines together and then connect those to a PVC connector. They make PVC/ hose thread addapters so you can connect your hose to that. They make some really nice battery operated timers that connect to hose bibs that are under $30 that work really well.
When you start using chemicals inline, you need to worry about back flow preventers. It is code to have one on each hose bib on a house, but if it is a really old house, it might not have one. If not, I would put one on. The cheapest way to inline fertilize your water is getting a less than $10 proportioner. It is brass and has a tube on it. You put the tube in a bucket of solution and when water runs through the hose, it automatically flows some of the fertilizer to your plants.
Anyway, that will give you a start. Except for the timer, you can probably set the rest up for $50 or less. Good luck, Tom
 
Cool, thanks for the info!

And as far as critters go, I'm not overly worried. My parents two dogs (a purebred Jack Russel and a toy poodle/schpitz mix) did an exceptionally thorough job chasing and/or killing the critters during the time they lived there
 
I've worked on residential irrigation systems in Massachusetts for about 6 "seasons" and they are a great way to get water to plants (in ground or in containers) without soaking the foliage/fruit of the plant. I would just plant in rows, making sure that plants with different water needs are in different rows, in case you want some plants getting water every day versus every other or every third day. You can get away with running some 1/2" blank (no holes) drip tubing down each row. Then you just push in an emitter at each plant and run a section of the black "noodle" (1/4") tubing into each plant. You can buy different emitters (1 gallon per hour, 1/2 gallon per hour, etc.) depending on how much water that particular plant needs. Some sites sell a kit that comes with everything you need.

As for nutrients in the water supply, I wouldn't recommend it. As cycadjungle said, you'd want a backflow preventer to make sure the nutes don't get sucked back into your drinking water in the event that your indoor plumbing loses water pressure. These are expensive and in MA, you need a plumber to install them. The other issue is that it's hard to make sure that each plant is getting the correct amount of nutes. You're basically just infusing the water with nutes and hoping that they evenly distribute to all of your plants, which probably won't happen. It's going to be much better to just manually apply your nutes to each plant and then run the drip to soak it in.

Good luck!
 
I'm planning something very similar myself this year and it is basically what the guys above me have posted for the plants in the ground or in pots. Home Depot has little timers for the water and the black tubing and emitters can be bought online for reasonably cheap. The only difference my system will have is that I will need a float valve on a water tank for my hydro plants so that I can keep a constant water level during the dead of summer. I'll have to connect all the hydro tanks together so they can be filled by one line and one float valve.
 
Make sure you have enough drip spots for each plant. My experience with the drippers is that they only soak a small area of the ground, smaller than a dinner plate, so if you put a single one right at the base of a plant it might not be enough to fully water the whole root system. put one dripper a few inches to either side of each plant, or if you are using a soaker type hose, loop it around each plant in about a 1' circle.

YMMV and the best thing would be to assemble one or two sections and test it out to see how it delivers water, then plan the rest of the system from there.
 
Back flow preventers aren't that expensive and certainly don't require any specialty skill to install (standard male/female hose thread inline installation). $2.50 each

Or a brass back flow preventer: $5.24 each.

I use a soaker hose dripline with embedded 1/2 gal per hour emitters ( no need to run individual spaghetti run emitters to each plant, especially with only a 2 foot wide bed) in my garden with an EZ- FLO fert injector with fair to middlin' results.

I did use drip tape, but you only get a couple of years out of that stuff at best, while the dripline costs a bit more it will last up to 8 years. You could build a system yourself that would last many years for your 3 row x 45 ft. raised bed garden for around $175, but that includes a programmable digital timer as well as a fertilizer injection system. Add some plastic mulch and you're weed free. ;)

If interested here's a parts list, starting from the hose bib:The dripline is offered in either 100 ft. or 400 ft. rolls so you'll have enough extra from the two 100 ft. rolls to do 4 of your 45 ft. or 50 ft. garden rows if wanted with the addition of a few more parts (1 more compression tee, 1 x compression adaptor, 1 x Compression Hose End Plug and 1 x row valve = $3.55 additional for a forth 50 ft. row).

Expansion of this system to a larger garden area would not cost very much and dividing the cost over the multi year service life makes it a frugal time and labor saving investment. It's what I use and I have no complaints other than the time it takes to pick the harvest overload. :)
 
Thanks for all the info! It's mucho appreciated!
 
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