On our last video we planted our first plot of cool weather crops for this fall
We planted some collards. We planted some Lacinato kale. We planted some cauliflower
And we also planted some green magic broccoli.
I wanna show you how that's coming along and what we're having to do just to keep it hanging on until the temperature breaks.
Let's see here. It looks like it is a cozy
95-96 degrees out today, nice little burner.
For some fall planting. So here's that plot. We planted in the previous video
collards, kale, broccoli, and cauliflower
And these things are hanging on just kind of barely hanging on
It's toasty out here today
Even though I've got this drip tape buried underneath these plants still been having to run the overhead sprinkler
Unfortunately, just to keep these things cooled off
My strategy has been to run the drip tape for an hour or
So in the morning and then in the afternoons when it gets blazing hot
I have to put this overhead on the plant start wilting a little bit the heats just too much for them
So we've just been having to cool them off keep them limping along
Until we cool off a little bit
You can see right there with this kale plant
it's making it just barely it's not standing straight up like it should be but
It'll get there once it cools off a little bit. If all the weathermen are right, we've only got a few more days of this
One or two more days of 95 and then we're supposed to be clear of any 90 degree weather
For hopefully until next you know late spring early summer or so
So once these temperatures get below 90s this stuff will do a lot better it's just right now
We have to kind of baby it along
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welcome as always so we've got that plot planted 11 rows and now
It's time to work on this baby right here. These plots are all the same size 30 by 35
And this plot here is where we had some sorghum sudangrass
This stuff was up five or six foot tall before we mowed it down
We put a tarp on it to kind of help kill that mode
sorghum sudangrass
Knock it back so we could get in here and cultivate and plant everything. We still got a good bit of residue
Down here that's chopped up. You can see some of that
sorghum sudangrass clippings down there.
Now after we removed that tarp what we did we came in here with some of our chicken manure compost our chicken manure
with the peanut holes in it and those feathers that I showed you in a previous video
and we put six
wheelbarrow loads on this plot
I've had a lot of people asking how much do you put per thousand square feet? So I put six wheelbarrow loads my wheelbarrow is
7 cubic feet that's how much it holds
It's about 42 cubic feet on this thousand foot plot right here. We spread those wheelbarrow loads out
Got it
nice and raked out nice and even and
Then came in here with the tiller and chopped it all up so we could chop up some of that leftover
Sorghum Sudangras, debris any chunks that we had
From that chicken manure compost and just get the soil nice and workable and ready for planting
We're using the same row spacing here that we did the previous plot
So we've got 11 rows here on a 3 foot spacing
Already came in here with my double wheel hoe and the plow set in the furring position
Laid off those rows made a furrow there so I can bury my drip tape
And before we plant this next round of fall crops
I wanted to kind of go through a little bit more in detail on this drip system and how it works and
How we hook it up?
A lot of times people are scared to start using drip irrigation in their garden because they just feel intimidated by it
They think it looks complicated
hard to set up and
They're just not real familiar with it
So today I want to show you just how easy it is to connect everything get everything set up
So then when you do get ready to water your garden and once the temperatures cool down
all you got to do is just go hook a water hose up and that's gonna water everything nice and evenly
so the first component of
Our drip system that we put down
Or lay out is this mainline tubing here
And this is a solid poly tubing here
And it's got this blue line on it and that blue line is going to be important because that's where we're gonna want to punch
our holes
For our drip tape row starts to go in and that's going to ensure we get them all kind of pointing in the same direction
So we'll straighten that out a little bit and get it all facing toward where the row is gonna go
I
Like to take a couple bricks or something heavy and put on each side or each end of the mainline tubing just to kind of hold
It down until I get everything
Installed and then on the very ends of the mainline tubing
you've got these little clamps called a figure eight end clamp that crimps that
So no water is coming out of the end and then to feed our mainline tubing. We've got this piece here
We call a filter regulator combo so you got your filter right here
Your pressure regulator which you need to knock it down
So it doesn't blow out the lines your water hose hooks up right here, and then you've got this tee here
Which I like to use so I can put this in the middle of my mainline section.
Now you could certainly put it on the end and run it in one direction
But I found that if we put it in the middle, we get a more equal distribution of water
So what we'll do is we'll cut this mainline in half right here
hook up one end of this side of T
one end to the other side of the T and that way we get a nice equal distribution of water
Over this entire plot, so we cut our mainline in half between these two rows and we're going to put one end
Onto here
Twist it on there and we want to make sure that blue line is facing out that way and then we'll just tighten this nut down
And then on the other side we'll do the same thing put
It in there make sure the blue line is facing the right way and tighten that nut down
So now when we hook our water hose up right here
Water is gonna go through that filter through that pressure regulator and then split off right there and feed that main line
to the right and to the left
So it can feed all the drip rows in this garden.
The next step is to put down the drip tape or bury the drip tape now you'll see a lot of other
Farmers and channels out there that lay their drip tape on top of the soil and I just can't understand
Why you would want to do that. We bury ours for several different reasons.
The first one which is especially important as hot as it is.
Is that your surface evaporation is greatly reduced when you bury it so your plants actually get to use
More of that water that you're putting out then if you laid it on the surface where you're going to get more evaporation
So we bury it so we get more bang for our buck out of the water that we're putting out.
Another reason to bury it is just it's out of the way we can actually take a little
Shallow weeding tool and cultivate on top of it when it's buried we don't have to move the drip out of the way to weed
Between our rows or around our rows. It's just nice and out of the way some people recommend putting staples on top of it
But forget the staples just bury it and you don't have to worry about that wherever you put it. That's where it's gonna be
So as is the case with almost anything in this world
There's an easy way to do something and there's a hard way to do something
I'll show you the easy way to lay drip tape and then we'll also talk about how you can do it if you don't have
Access to this nice tooling that makes it easy for you.
So this here is our drip tape layer attachment and this is a setup that attaches to our double wheel hoe only the
double not the single or the high arch
and it holds a
1,640-foot role of drip tape and basically lays it down in the furrow and buries it simultaneously.
Now for this thing to work properly you have to make a furrow it won't work
Well, if you just try to do it on top of the soil
So you've got to make a furrow first, and then this thing is going to lay the tape
Several inches deep in that furrow and bury it
so you've got that roller down there and that's going to basically
Apply the tape in the furrow nice and tight and then the plow set comes right behind it and covers it up
Really really simple yet
Really really effective device for small-scale garden allows you to lay this tape really fast and really easy.
Now if you don't have a wheel hoe or don't have our drip tape layer attachment
Can you still bury your drip tape and still plant on top of it, like we do? Yes, you can.
Let me tell you how you would do that.
So without this nifty tool here. It basically becomes a two-man job
You need one person on the end of the row holding the roll, or maybe you can design some kind of device to
Hold the roll sort of like a water hose stand
But you need something to hold the roll there and then somebody else to pull out the tape
Along that row there and once you lay it in the row
Then you've got to keep it nice and tight and then come back behind it with the plow set in
the
Hilling position and cover it up. You could also cover it up with a rake
so you did you don't necessarily need a wheel hoe you could make these furrows with a hoe and
Cover it up with a rake it would just take you a lot longer so you can do it without this attachment here
Many people do it just makes it a two-man job. Whereas using this. It's a one-man job.
Now whether you're laying drip tape with this drip tape layer
Attachment or doing it by hand or burying it or putting on top of the soil.
You always want to make sure those emitters are facing upwards
Towards the Sun and so to get started with this process
We're just going to take our nail that we include with the drip tape layer. We're going to poke it down
Through that tape into the soil to hold it in place there and we're just gonna walk along that row and put down some tape.
So I'm going to go ahead and get these eleven rows knocked out real quick like and then we'll talk about
Hooking up the row starts and the row ends on the drip tape.
Roll that beautiful bean footage.
Alright, alright, alright that was quick and easy
Only took us about 10 minutes to lay those 11 rows of drip tape there just to note
We do include two of these staking nails with our drip tape layer.
So you don't have to walk back and forth across the garden every time you've got two nails you can just grab the one
From the previous side of the garden when you go to start a new row. You can see our drip tape lines there
They're buried
And then they stick out at the beginning of the row where we'll hook them up to that mainline tubing there
Another neat thing about that drip tape layer is it makes two little perfect mini furrows?
On each side of that buried drip line, which is awesome for planting carrots or planting anything on double rows.
We'll talk more about that in some upcoming videos
Now if you didn't want to plant a whole plot at one time like I've been doing and you just wanted to plant a few
rows
One week and plant a few more rows the next week
You don't have to lay all this tape at one time that main line is sealed so you can lay
Tape for a couple rows plant them
Be watering them and then when you get ready to install a few more rows
You can do that one step at a time if you'd like. That way you don't have to do it all in one day.
So now let's talk about how we hook up these rows starts and these row ends to make the system complete
So this piece here is what we call a row start. So this connects the drip tape to this main line
So the drip tape slides on that barb right there this nut is used to tighten it down
Onto that tape and
Then this little barb right here sticks into this main line where that blue line is
So you can use a knife but I like scissors because it just gives a little cleaner cut
Come in here inch or so before the main line and I'm gonna cut that right there
I'm gonna make sure this green nut is backed all the way back
We'll slide the tape onto this barb here
I'm gonna give it a little twist
Make sure it's on there nice
And then I'm gonna tighten this nut down here
Onto the tape so we get a nice secure connection and then to hook this piece up to the mainline
We use this little tool here called a hole punch. And so we're going to poke it right into that blue line right there
Got our hole poked there
And then we just take this barb
Stick it in that hole and it'll pop in
And we're good to go. That's one row start installed there now. We do make these with a valve on them as well
So if you want to turn certain rows in your garden on or off, you can get the ones with the valve and do that
I usually just use these because I'm watering all the rows at one time now once you get all your row starts installed you can
Turn the water on and kind of flush out the system
Let some water run out of here
If you're worried about any dirt being in the lines there so you can flush that out
But to close these off you'll see a lot of people doing it several different ways
People will tie these in knots, fold them over
Use another piece to kind of crimp it but the easiest way we found are these things here called row ends.
You'll see it's got a narrow
lip on one end
Kind of a wider one on the other end. So what you do is you take your drip tape
you slide it through that narrow end and
Then you're just going to fold this drip tape
About two times and then slide it back through that big end, and you've got a nice secure
Clamped drip tape row end there. So we've got all our row starts hooked up all 11 of them
and our row ends put on and our drip system is now complete
All we have to do is come in here and hook up a water hose
To this brass piece right here and to feed all those lines we can get those water spots showing up and we'll be ready to plant.
So I hope explaining kind of the nuts and bolts of drip irrigation
Helped some of you guys out there that are on the fence about using it. Or maybe you think it's a little complicated
It's really really simple. It's just a small investment of time upfront
When you're putting your garden together
That's going to save you
Tons of time throughout the lifespan of those plants because it makes it so easier to water everything
Evenly you're going to use less water. You're going to water more effectively
one of the other
frequent questions we get about drip irrigation is can I reuse it and we'll be
Reusing this stuff all throughout the fall and winter. So when one of the crops one of these rows is done
We'll go in will pull that crop out or cut it down. We'll rip up that tape
Cultivate that area clean it up if there any weeds there. We'll put the tape right back down
We don't even have to disconnect it from the mainline
We'll put the tape right back down and plant something else on top of it.
So I'll reuse this tape here four or five times before
I've probably cover crop or give this plot a rest. In this plot here we're going to be planting some cabbage
I've got some Cheers cabbage transplants some red cabbage
We're going to be planting some more kale. I've got some blue knight kale, some scarlet kale
We're also going to be planting some rutabagas and some purple cauliflower but we can't get it all in one day
Fall planting is like our elephant and as daddy always says you have to eat an elephant one bite at a time
So we do it one bite at a time. We set up our drip system one day
We'll plant it the next day.
So you have to stay tuned to the next video where we'll be planting all those awesome
transplants in this garden here
If you have any more questions about drip irrigation that I didn't answer
Please put those in the comments below and if you just started using drip irrigation
I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. Has it been a game-changer for you,
like it is for almost all the customers we hear from. I hope you guys enjoyed this video. We'll see you next time.