Hello friends So once you set up your raised beds or garden
Its time to provide some kind of an irrigation system for your plants
Now if you provide a nice irrigation system, What it lets you do is it lets you forget
about watering your plants on a regular basis And pretty much does a decent job for you
And using drip irrigation or micro irrigation You can save a lot of water compared to the
sprinklers that you are already using As you can see we already have a sprinkler
system setup for the lawn And now that we have converted our lawn to
a raised bed what we can do is use the existing sprinkler system
And set up a micro irrigation system So you can see how this sprinkler appears
on the riser And you should have one sprinkler on each
corner of your lawn, maybe more And what we are going to do today is
Try to convert the sprinkler system into a drip or a micro irrigation system
So you can start doing this activity of setting up your irrigation system
Right after you have set up your raised beds I actually set up my trellis because i had
some PVC pipes laying around But its best if you have your raised bed ready
and then get going with setting up your irrigation system
[music] So to convert your existing sprinkler system
to a drip irrigation or a micro irrigation system
You will need a converter Which converts your sprinklers to a low volume
irrigation system which looks like this It basically fits on top of your existing
sprinklers And then also has a built in pressure regulator
Remember that micro sprinklers use less water pressure than your sprinkler systems
So this comes with a built in regulator a 30 psi regulator as you can see here
It also comes with a filter built in And an inlet which goes to your sprinklers
And what it does not come with is What we are going to see right now
You need some garden staples to secure your pipes or your main line
Your main line is tubing, 1/2 inch tubing This is a 100 feet tubing
And these are the micro sprinklers Now these micro sprinklers are very different
from the sprinklers that you use for your lawn
The micro sprinklers will only spray a short distance
You can still spray a larger distance if you wish to its adjustable
All of these are adjustable The micro sprinklers will
These are 180 degrees adjustable and we also have some 90 degrees
So the ones on your left are 180 degrees and the ones on the right are the 90 degree micro
sprinklers You will also need some elbows to connect
your main line tubing And also some tees so you can branch out your
main line tubing And you will soon find out how many of these
you need So if you look at this diagram this should
give you an idea of where to place your micro sprinklers
So basically at the corners of each bed you will place the 90 degree micro sprinkler
And you will place a 180 degree micro sprinkler right in between your large beds
[music] So the first step is to turn your timer in
the off position And now carefully look at all the sprinkler
heads that you can see And if you want you can just dig it out so
that you can see it in a better way And the first step that you will need to do
is cap off all your sprinkler heads except for one
So what you basically do is remove the sprinkler head from the riser by turning it in an anti-clockwise
direction And you can remove the riser from any level
So if you have a short riser below your main riser that is perfectly fine
Just use the threaded cap to cover the riser And that completes the step of capping off
the sprinkler head So you can repeat this step for all your sprinkler
heads Except for one which we will use as our source
So go around and make sure the sprinkler heads are capped off with the appropriate sized
threaded nut So i am going to show you how to replace your
sprinkler head with this riser connection kit
Now note that i did not use this as the candidate for watering my raised beds
But i am going to show you how it needs to be done
By using this sprinkler head as an example [music]
And once you attach this riser connection You get two main lines of irrigation that
you can run along the top part So you will choose one candidate sprinkler
head That you will use for your drip irrigation
line Make sure everything else is capped off
And you have one emitter left And what we have done is we have attached
our product To that one emitter that was our candidate
emitter And to that you would attach your main line
Which is your 1/2 inch tubing And now our aim is to get that 1/2 inch tubing
all the way across towards your raised bed So if you remember we spoke about the garden
staples The garden staples will hold your main line
While you are attaching all your accessories or all your elbows and tees
It just makes it easier to work with the 1/2 inch tubing
Now remember that the new 1/2 inch tubing might be a lot springy
So just bear with it, it will come to its regular shape in sometime
So keep using those garden staples And keep securing your main line
So at the corner you will use an elbow to connect your main line to come towards your
raised bed So you can see that elbow connected in the
corner And the main line tubing goes in the elbow
right away You can just push it in
Now this is a tee that will go towards the raised bed
It will take your main line from the ground to your raised bed
So let's complete the connection between the elbow and this tee
So just push in your main line inside the elbow on one side
And then insert it in the tee on the other side
Its actually very easy to do this You might need to use a little bit of pressure
to push in those tubing But it should be fairly easy
And the main line tubing is very easy to cut You can either use pruners or scissors
And it does a good job of cutting the main line tubing
You can see you have to use a little bit of pressure sometimes to push the main line tubing
inside the tees and the elbows And the first bed is usually the most difficult
to set up Once you get a hang of how the system works
Setting up the rest of the system is a piece of cake
So we can now use the garden staples to secure our main line again
And you can keep doing this as often as you want
You could also use some hammers if your ground is very hard
So that the garden staples stay in place i have a lot of grass here so that you can see
that the staples are not staying in place So you can make some adjustments with the
length As in my case i was seeing that the length
was a little bit more So i just cut it a little bit short
And if you have raised beds the advantage is that you can even use some pvc clamps to
secure the pipes Along the raised beds
So this is what it looks like after completion That is the pvc clamp
They are basically plastic clamps which you can screw on to your raised beds
So we have elbows on the four corners connecting the main line
That's our pvc clamp again It holds it very well in place
[music] Now we spoke about micro sprinklers
But that's not the only option you have available For your drip irrigation or micro irrigation
project Let's see what options you have
[music] So this is how our completed project looks
like in action All the emitters are now spraying
And remember these micro sprinklers are adjustable So you could regulate the speed by just turning
a knob Just like that
So you can spray very less to a lot more And these are the micro sprinklers on stakes
Now one of the reasons i like using micro sprinklers instead of all the other options
is that Micro sprinklers can cover a large area very
easily With the other kind of emitters lets say for
example with the soaker hose You would need to know where exactly your
plants are on the raised bed And in most cases what i have noticed is that
i sometimes randomly place my plants around the raised bed
For example okras are 6 inches apart whereas tomatoes are a feet apart
So if you use a soaker hose you have to keep changing the position of your irrigation system
Whereas if you use these micro sprinklers they will only spray inside your bed
But it will make sure that it covers the entire area of your raised bed
And here you can see the suggested runtime for these micro sprinklers
And that should give you a good idea So this technique is expandable as well
As you can see i added elbows here to keep the main line straight
And then i also tapped off into a separate raised bed irrigation line
For a raised bed that i added later So i hope this gives you a good idea
To set up irrigation for your raised beds And i am sure that you will be able to easily
set up your own drip or micro irrigation system And that should save you a lot of water and
keep your plants well watered So i hope you liked this episode
And i will see you again soon in another episode of California Gardening
Until then...Happy Gardening.