Warning - only watch today's vlog if you are a complete nerd about
irrigation because that is what Jacques and I are going to be setting up all day
today.
The goal is to get the whole.
Backyard in-ground garden irrigated today. We'll leave these pots for now, but.
Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. All.
Of that would be fantastic.
I know irrigation can be really confusing so I'm going to try to break it down
by part and set the whole thing up step-by-step so you can follow along,
starting with this piece right here, which is the beginning of the system.
This piece here is really three pieces, starting here.
So the hose will come in this way.
This piece right here is the backflow preventer.
So once water comes past here it cannot go backwards,
which is good for keeping your line clean. Here we have our filter.
This is just another way to keep the line clean.
And then here we have the pressure regulator.
This is really important because drip is rated for a certain amount of pressure.
So this one is 15 PSI.
So it's going to limit the water flowing out this way to 15 PSI,
which is what this drip tape right here requires.
So what we're gonna do, you can go really two ways with drip.
You can either do drip line tubing, which is this right here,
which is probably what you're more familiar with.
Or you can go farmer mode and go with drip tape.
We opted for drip tape for these in-ground beds,
because what you really want is just coverage over a large area.
I'm not going to plant the plants in the backyard in the exact same spot every
single time that I replant those beds.
So to run drip line into each individual plant root zone, to me,
doesn't make a lot of sense. I'd rather just throw maybe 5, 6,
7 lines of tape down. So what we have here I believe is a 5/8 inch tape.
And the way this works is you can customize the distance between these emitters.
So the emitters are built right into the tape like this.
You can customize the distance. You can go four inches, six inches, 12 inches.
And you can also customize how much water per hour flows out of these.
So we went with six inch spacing and a quarter gallon per hour.
So let's just say you had a 20 foot long bed,
six inch spacing means you have 40 emitters.
So each of those lines is going to put out what, 10 gallons per hour of water.
So that's how you can kind of match it and see if you know if you're getting
enough water.
So what we're going to do now is show you the whole connection of the main line,
which is not pictured here.
That's what feeds the water through the system into either this or this.
Here I just rig up a very simple system to show you how it would look in an
actual bed application like we're doing out there.
So come on in and take a look at this. Here's where it's coming from the hose.
This is a simplified setup with the backflow, the pressure,
and then the connect to the main line. So this is the half inch mainline tubing.
And then this is just an example of what you can do with it.
You can throw an elbow on it. If you want, you can throw a T on it.
There's a lot of different ways to connect this to some other situation.
But let's pretend this section right here is going to a bed. Now,
one thing you could do,
which I'm not going to do right now but you could do this is you could actually
put in a coupler here that would connect the main line to itself.
And then you could turn off an entire bed with the flip of one switch.
So that's something you could do. Let's say you changed the bed out. Well, hey,
my corn is done.
I'm just going to turn it like that and I don't have to get any water coming out
to this system right here. Now, this is your drip tape.
So this is 5/8 inch drip tape, like I said,
we've chosen six inches between emitters right here.
And each of these emitters will put out a quarter gallon an hour.
So to connect this, there's a couple of different ways you can do this,
but this is the one that we've chosen.
So this punches into the main line right here, this side.
This side will sort of squeeze tight around the tape to create a solid
seal here. So what you need is some sort of punch,
which is kind of the most fun part of it. So you come in,
you slot it right around your main line tubing like that.
You give it a quick punch.
Now you've put a hole in it and all you need to do is just pop that in.
Just like that. It's nice and secure. And so now we have,
this is sort of our header row you could say with the water flowing through like
this. And you're just pulling out, down a bed like this.
So what we can do here is make sure that you're opening this up.
You'll just slot this on.
What I like to do is kind of rotate this 90 degrees because it wants to kind of
come backwards a little bit when you're screwing it in, like that.
And there you go, because you want this emitter on the top.
So the soil will be right here.
This emitter is going to be dripping downwards over the top.
The next thing to do is to connect this to the drip tape itself.
Now you want your drip emitters facing upwards,
and sometimes when you screw it on it'll kind of twist it a little bit.
So I actually like to put it in facing 90 degrees away and then as I tighten it
up like this, it will kind of bring itself back, facing up.
And sometimes you have to play around with it just slightly to make sure that it
ends up perfectly straight up. So there you go.
Now we have our header row.
We have a line of tape coming out and we can actually toggle this line on and
off. Let's say we're growing something that needed less water,
I could turn it off. The real ending piece,
all you have to do is make sure that you have an end cap of some sort.
So here's one that I could flush out if I wanted to,
by taking this off and then turning the system on.
And it would flush out any debris if I somehow got something stuck in there.
And then what we'll do now is just attach this final piece to the
end here. So you can jam this on.
I like to make sure I have constant pressure pushing it in.
So I'll kind of push it in like that and then I'll tighten it like this.
Once it's tight enough, I'll then do that. And there you go.
You have a system. What you do here is just extend a couple more lines per bed.
Then you just move on to the next bed.
So that's what we're going to do right now.
That system you just saw me show you - the hose connection, backflow preventer,
all that - is connected up. So this is a semi-temporary setup obviously,
because the main line is just running right across this path here.
But here's the plan. You run the main line up this way.
We have sort of a patchwork garden back here.
And so what we've done is run a main line this way and over there to get
the melon patch. And then we'll pull east to west,
just pull down like this. We'll go about every foot.
So we go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5ish or so.
And then as you go over here, because we have this weird herb raised bed,
which looks amazing by the way, we elbow up into that.
Cap it off.
And we have this T that just continues on to irrigate the large pepper and
tomato bed.
And so what we're going to do now is just grab the drip line and run it on out.
Okay, the first bed is all set up. But every time you set a new part of it up,
to me it makes sense to pressure check to see if you have any issues with the
system.
Because all it takes is one coupling that's not screwed in all the way or not
configured correctly and you lose pressure in the whole system.
So here's what we did here.
Roughly a foot spacing because you want the horizontal seepage to almost match
each other. So let's say it comes out six inches here, six inches here.
Then we've got coverage in the gappage right there. But we've run a test.
I'll show you.
You can see it streaming out right there. Another.
Thing that we did is you'll notice all this drip of course is running above
ground, which means that this black tubing can get pretty hot.
And so what we did is we added these couplers at the end.
Before you set the system up, you can actually drain out all the hot water,
it's cold right now. It takes about 30 seconds.
Otherwise you're going to be heating up the root zone considerably.
All right guys, it's really hot out here, but we're still hammering.
And we've got every bed but two done. Every time we do one bed,
we do a pressure test and the sound is so satisfying.
So I'm going to turn it on for you. So we're on.
Let's see if we can get the sound. Let's do it over here. Yeah.
So we just did the pepper and tomato bed.
See, they're moving. They're moving.
I'm not even hearing a sound. Wow. Is it going to deny us a sound?
It's denying us our gift.
There we go. There we go. Hold on.
I don't know if you guys can hear it,
but it keeps getting higher and higher in frequency.
That's how you know it's pressurizing.
Oh, oops, oops. Did we do that? Oops,
did we set up an irrigation system?
There you go. When the sound turns off you know it's running.
And when it's dripping out, of course you know that it's running. So.
The pepper and tomato bed is irrigated at about a foot spacing.
Beautiful! The sun is going down. The system is fully installed,
at least this version of the system.
Cause something crazy is going to come up in the next month or two.
But let me show you how it works. I have a test run.
I put it on for an hour or so just to see how much horizontal spreading of the
water there is, and I'm pretty pleased. So it's on right now.
This soil is quite moist. You can see it's actually dripping.
But what you want to look for is how far horizontally does the emitter
permeate into the soil? So the water will sort of cascade outwards.
It'll wick out there.
And what we saw after running it for an hour is there are no dry spots on the
surface of this soil. So it's completely saturated the entire bed.
We can come and look at the corn for another example of that. And you can see,
a little bit drier in this area. But if I dig down,
that soil is completely completely saturated, which is exactly what you want.
And so that means that our spacing and our run time is pretty accurate here.
So I'm very, very pleased.
It has been a week or two since we've put the drip irrigation in,
it has been absolutely amazing here in the backyard.
I'll show you just a little bit of the progress. Squash and okra doing really,
really well. A lot of people think this is a mildew issue on squash.
It's just the pattern on some squash. So don't worry about that.
The beans that were put in a few videos back, fantastic.
Corn is starting to tassel and actually sort of some early silk formation down
here on the second crop of corn for the season.
Definitely getting some weird pest issues, but hey, it is what it is.
But the real star of the show over here,
this really started to love the more frequent and deeper watering.
As you can see, we've got watermelon right there,
got another variety right there, a couple cantaloupe hiding over there.
So all in all, this is really just version one, like I said,
of the drip irrigation system.
There's going to be a lot of automation coming in,
the front yard is going to be set up, the orchard is going to be set up.
So I'll probably make this a playlist here on the Homestead channel.
But hopefully this type of setup inspires you to go out and get it done because
it saves you so, so, so much time.
And it's really not that hard to put together. So until next time,
good luck in the garden and keep on growing.