JOHN: All right, this is John Kohler from growingyourgreens.com, coming to you from
my front yard. This used to be a standard residential house with a lawn, and now it's
a raised-bed edible garden where I grow a majority of my vegetables here. And in the
summertime, we grow more of the fruits like tomatoes and cucumbers, and I have several
fruit trees, but I got the question, lately, is: “What about irrigation, John? How do
you put in a drip system?” So I'm gonna do my best to explain that today, and in the
next couple weeks here, I'm gonna actually go over to a friend's house and we're gonna
take his backyard—he has a standard backyard—that just has grass and stuff, in it, and we're
gonna convert his backyard, and put in at least one raised bed in for him, including
the irrigation and everything, so stay tuned for that episode, coming up in the next couple
weeks.
But today, we're gonna talk about irrigation. Basically, there's two ways to do it. The
first way is how I did it in the backyard—let me go ahead jump down here. The first way
I did it is in the backyard and that's just using the regular hose bibb—most people
know what that is. It's where you turn on the water and it comes out the hose and you
water things by hand—we converted that over to drip irrigation. So, why drip irrigation?
Well, drip irrigation basically puts water at the point, at the plant, where the plant
needs it: in its root zone. So, it's very efficient with water. Many sprinklers just
sprinkle, and a lot of sprinklers you see will overspray the sidewalk—it just sprays
everything, gets everything wet. And when you have a lawn, maybe you need sprinklers,
but when you have plants, if you sprayed everything, you know, it wouldn't be so good.
So when you're watering only at the base of the plant, that's the only area where the
plant is getting water, and guess what? There's gonna be less weeds because you're just not
watering all the space and all the soil around the plant that you planted, so you're not
gonna germinate as many seeds that are already existing in the soil. So, saving water, less
weed growth, and it just makes it—you know, if you put the water, put the irrigation on
a timer, you're free to travel. You don't have to worry about going home every day and
watering your plants and missing a day, and 'oh it's gonna dry out.' You know, you have
it on a timer, and they've got some really cool connected Internet timersnow—I'm quite
not there yet, maybe one of these days—you can log in from work, see what's going on,
they have rain sensors, you can see how wet the soil is, interfaces with, like, the weather,
websites, and all kinds of crazy stuff. One of these maybe I'll do that, but I've just
got some standard irrigation timers.
So, it's really important to get on a drip irrigation system, it's just a lot more efficient.
And yes, you will make an initial investment that will cost a little bit in some of the
supplies, but in the long run, just for the convenience of not having to water. I mean,
in the summertime when it gets really hot, you know, I'm confident that everything's
gettin' watered.
So, we're gonna get into the two ways: the first way, that's actually the hose bibb way,
that's in the backyard, and in the front yard, since I did have a full lawn here, we had
the pre-existing sprinkler system with the sprinkler controls, with the timer and the
sprinkler valve that we basically converted over to work with the drip system. So, first,
let's go to the backyard, since that's what most people are gonna do, and that's what
I recommend people doing, if they're just getting into this irrigation for the first
time. And I guess, later in the video, I'll show a clip of how not to do your irrigation,
how I used to do it. I've been through a lot of different ways of doing the irrigation
throughout the years, and I've found this is the most efficient and effective way to
do the drip irrigation.
All right, so we're here in my backyard; we've got some construction going on—we're pullin'
up and puttin' pavers--we put a big pile of dirt right next to all the irrigation controls
and everything, but we can still explain it to you. So what we have here is: water comes
out of my house, and, once again, we have a filter housing here, but the water's being
filtered in the front, so, currently, we don't have a filter in there, and then, it comes
out, and basically this is my hose spigot right here. And we can turn it on and off
with this ball valve. I like ball valves better than the standard valves, they seem to be
a lot more efficient. And then it comes out, and we divide it into four—and you don't
necessarily need to do this, but if you have a water timer, you might still want to have
a hose connection, so you can hand-water if you need to.
So you can have a splitter, to split it into two. We have a splitter to split it into four,
and I'll show you this side: here we have a Gilmore water timer—so this is a Gilmore
9400 water timer. The reason why I like the Gilmore water timer—and I've experimented
with other timers—is you can pop this off, literally, and all this is now is a ball valve,
so you can literally turn it on and off with your hand, so you can manually control it
if this timer does go out—there are batteries in the bottom, so that's really nice—so
it's a ball valve. Some of the sprinkler controls out there are actually diaphragm valves and
they have problems—especially when it freezes, so if you forget to bring, and take out your
diaphragm valves in the winter time, and it freezes, guess what? They're gone! But with
this one, they've lasted over the winter without any problems.
So I'm gonna have two examples here...(shows the Gilmore water timer in the box) So this
is the Gilmore in the box, it's a ball valve, works really well, that's the kind I recommend,
And you also wanna check to make sure it has a standard-type battery—this actually uses
four double-A's, double-A's are quite plentiful. Some will have 9-volts, and 9-volts can get
a lot more expensive, actually, than double-A's.
Here's another one I picked up: it's a Vigoro with a wireless moisture sensor, so this is
kinda cool. This will sense the soil wetness, and if it's wet enough, it actually won't
turn on, it will override the sensor. But this is, once again, a diaphragm valve, the
type I don't recommend, and most places sell the diaphragm valve type. I'm not saying that
this won't work, it will work, but definitely, in the wintertime, take it out of service,
put it in your house. Don't keep it outside, it'll freeze. Plus, the failure rate for these
guys with the diaphragm valve is a lot higher, and in my experience with the ball valve,
as well. And this one actually does take a 9-volt.
So once you come out of the water faucet, you put the water timer in place, and that
mainly controls where the water flow goes out to your drip line. So let's see, the drip
line, it's actually quite buried right now. And the basic thing you need to do—and this
is very, very, very important—if you don't remember anything else from this video, you'll
wanna remember this. And I'll go ahead and unscrew it. I mean, you could put a lawn sprinkler
or anything into this, but this is the drip line, and it's buried—oh, there it's comin'
up now-- so all you need to do is get this one first part, which I'll unscrew so you
guys can see it—it's actually screwed in...oh, it's not too tight...
This part is critical! Do not put an irrigation system in without this part. This is actually
called a hose bibb anti-siphon valve. And you can kinda see in there--what it is it's
an anti-siphon valve—so literally, it's a one-way valve. So it only lets the water
go out into your garden and not back up, 'cause sometimes it can act like a siphon. And say
you have mucky water, and it'll suck the water back through your irrigation pipes into your
house water, and then you'll be drinkin' nasty garden water. So get one of these. I know
it's an extra five bucks, and you don't really need it, but you should definitely buy it,
and don't do drip irrigation without this.
So once you have that part, the only other part you're gonna need is this part right
here, and this basically converts over from the hose bibb to the ½-inch drip pipe, which
is one simple part—I think they're about two dollars. And the other thing you may consider
as well: we control it here with the ball valve on the splitter we have, is the water
pressure, so you wanna get a pressure regulator, 'cause if your pressure is too high, you'll
start poppin' out your emitters and you're gonna have some issues with that. I prefer
to have a ball valve on there so we can manually adjust how much we need, rather than a fixed,
a diaphragm, a fixed piece in there that's gonna set my pressure at a certain pressure.
So that's pretty much it: you just convert over to this, you run your drip line out this,
and you can definitely bury this stuff and you can pop it up right in your raised-bed
garden. And at each point, you're just gonna pop in drip emitters.
I also want to go over a couple parts I have here. In some cases it might be worthwhile
to get a little kit like this (Holds up a tree-and-shrub kit box). Sometimes these kits
have some good parts and sometimes works out to be less expensive. Sometimes the kits have
parts that you might not use. So, in this kit, what do we have here? (opens box) This
kit was actually on clearance at Wal-Mart, and we can always use extra drip parts here,
so I bought the kit. It has some different connectors, emitters and things. It has this
spaghetti tube that I recommend not using (holds up coiled up black tube), but more
conveniently, it does have the adapter to adapt over to the drip tube, and it also has
that one-way anti-siphon valve, with a 25 PSI regulator. So if you have these kits here,
and they come with a big drip hose, and not the spaghetti tube, that's what I recommend
to get. And many times, it's cheaper to that than actually buy the parts separately, but
just definitely check and see what they have at your local home improvement store.
So I'll just go ahead and show you: once you have the hose laid out, just pop in the drip
emitters, it's real simple.
So this is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com!
We'll see you next time!
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