Hello, I'm Liz Zorab and this is Byther Farm and today I'm fitting a soaker hose.
It's been just over a month since I started planting in our new polytunnel
from Direct Plants and I'm really pleased at how it's looking. On this side
there are trays of young plants coming through, on this side there are the ones that I've
potted on or pricked out and they're growing on, and then, in the center here,
are lots of salad plants at various different stages of growth.
It became obvious fairly quickly that I was going to need to work out some sort of system
for watering in here, because obviously, no rain water is getting into it and
daily walking in here with a hose was just wasteful of water and also wasteful
of my time. So I had to look around and there were various different systems you
could use. There are our dripper hoses, so that's like a little spike that you put
into the ground and it drips water at certain points and
then it's a bit of hose to another dripper points and you can put those
right next to individual plants and it will keep them watered. But what I'm
growing here is much more like a nursery bed,
so there's rows and rows and rows where I've planted seeds or on this side I've
planted out small plants that I've grown from seed. This side I've sown directly.
So I'm going to need to keep the ground fairly constantly moist and
for plants like cucumbers that don't like drying out and then getting wet and
then drawing again, they like the, kind of, constant moistness to prevent them from
going bitter.
So it became obvious I was going to need some sort of watering
system that was absolutely going to work in these circumstances.
So the soaker hose that I've chosen looks like this. It's actually made from
recycled car tires, so I like that it's recycled. And it is a porous pipe, so it's
got tiny little holes all the way through it
and the water comes in a very low pressure and very gently drips out of it.
Installing this was so simple! There was one part I wasn't quite sure about and I
rang my friend Tony. And his channel is Tony Stevens Gardens gadgets and
gizmo's. And if you're not familiar with Tony's channel, it's quite new, so I'll
leave a link above and below and you may want to check that out.
So I asked Tony
about a pressure reducer because everything I've read said I needed one of those.
He helped me make sure that I had that fitted the right way round,
And other than that, it was very straightforward.
You can buy this as a kit or
as I did which was individual components. I'll leave some links in the
information below to soaker hose kits and also to the individual components
that I've used to create this watering system.
And all I had to do was lay out
the hose on the ground where I wanted it to go. So I've got one length over on the
far side watering tomatoes, one in the midpoint here for the cucumbers and one
through these very lovely salad vegetables.
So I laid those out in place and then I bought stoppers, which push into the end
and connectors which are T shaped or L shaped or there are straight
connectors for joining lengths together. All I needed to do was spend a few
minutes making a diagram of how I wanted it to go and then I just start cutting it
and connecting it together.
Well that was easier said than done!
Putting a stopper into these was really difficult.
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It took me a few minutes to work
out the best way to make the fittings go into this pipe. So I went and got a cup
of very hot water, it was boiling water and let it cool a tiny bit, and then I
put the pipe into the hot water for 45 seconds to a minute which softened it.
It softened it considerably which meant it was much easier to put the end stoppers
in and the connectors in. So once I had the pipe laid out where I wanted it
exactly and all those connectors put in, the last
thing I needed to think about was how to get water to the pipe. And everything
I read said that I needed a water pressure reducer, which was a very simple
little fitting that clipped onto this very much like their garden hose systems
that have bits that clip on. In fact, that's exactly was it was. It was part
of a garden hose system, so it did all click together very easily and you just
need to make sure that on the water pressure thingy, you'll see an arrow and
that's the flow of the water. So you need to make sure that if the arrow is pointed
that way, the water comes in that way. And that will reduce the water pressure
right down. Because you don't want the water firing through here really quickly,
as otherwise it will come out really quickly nearest to the point of entry,
but you won't get any at the far end. If you've got a low pressure, it will seep
through the whole hose and you'll get an even distribution of
water throughout your soaker hose.
Clever stuff!
One of the other things worth
bearing in mind is that although the information that comes with the soaker
hoses says you can bury them up to eight inches deep, people that I've spoken to
said that those tiny little micro pores clog up really quite quickly, so the
hoses are better off being laid on top of the ground on the surface and
dripping through that way.
Now I've set this system up in two parts so I'm
having one system on that side and one on this side, so that during the
winter if I decide to only have one side of the polytunnel running, then I
can just be using that one side system. It might be, a later date, I want to
change that and connect them all up together, but using the connectors it's a
very simple job to do.
At the moment I'm using the garden hose to provide the
water for the system but that is not my intention long term. Very soon I plan to
bring two IBC tanks and pop them outside the door. Those are the great big 1000
liter storage tanks that you can get second hand. And as long as you buy one
that's had food products in it or food safe products in it then it's okay to
use them as long as they're given a good wash out. And I can set up a rainwater collection
system, store the rainwater and use that to water the plants in the polytunnel.
And so, wherever you are in the world and whatever you've got planned for today I
hope it's a good one and I also hope you'll join me again next time!