hey again it's jason from fraser valley rose farm and i have an irrigation
project today i replanted all of my roses from my
stock beds into a brand new stock field with tires around them to space them out
and give them more room to grow so i can evaluate new varieties and so on
but the thing is it's getting hot now and i have to work quickly to get some
irrigation on those now there's lots of different ways you
can do that the way i'm going to show you today
is probably what i would describe as fast and dirty a do-it-yourself pvc
piping irrigation system where all you have to use is some
lengths of pvc a literal handful of fittings
and a drill and you can very very quickly and very inexpensively get
together a do-it-yourself irrigation system let
me show you what i'm dealing with and then i'll show you how to fit these
together to irrigate it properly here's how i set up the roses this year
rainbow's end on the end of the row and here's the stock field you can see
that for each rose that i put in i put it into one of these tires as a
barrier to the surrounding grass and weeds
and my rose fans won't mind me walking around a little bit and showing you the
roses themselves i won't spend long on it that's
royal william
this one was given to me by a rose friend
singing in the rain i hadn't grown it before and it's not entirely spotless
but for the kind of spring we've had it's been a wet spring lots of disease
pressure and let's see if i can get this sun is
very hard on the colors here but let's see
how bright that is quite nice double delight
which i've always found a little bit hard
to keep in really good condition i have a couple others in the same color range
that i'm trying out this one is
melody parfumee you can only get just a slight into the color here it's bloomed
through but the exciting bit is down here
you can see it's throwing brand new basil shoots
all of these were transplanted in this year so they're just
getting established in a slight patch of shade here
i have Elina which is
you know a relatively disease resistant hybrid tea not quite white more towards
the yellow side or pale yellow and
here on the end well i can't leave out chapeau de napoleon with
those wonderful crested buds
all right let me show you the pieces i'm working with here
this is a piece of thin wall pvc it's not like
the schedule 40 heavy duty pvc it's a really light duty
pvc made for irrigation projects like this
and it's cheap compared to the heavier duty pvc the schedule 40.
this is like in my local hardware store was about three dollars compared to
about ten dollars for the other piece it's a ten foot length
so i've got a ten foot length here i've got a ten foot length here the other
thing that's cool about it is it's already flared on the one end
what that flare allows you to do and hope you can see that in the camera
is you can just slip fit them together you don't have to
buy an extra piece of fitting to glue them together in fact i'm not going to
glue this at all if i can help it i'm just going to leave them so i can
pull them apart and reorganize it around the yard
as much as i want and under low pressure applications
that should probably be fine so you can see i'm going to slide together then
six or seven lengths of this to cover that whole row in the field
and then what i'm going to do is i'm going to have to connect it to the water
supply and to do that i need pieces like this
so this piece here is on the one end female hose thread on the other end
female iron pipe thread and i'm going to connect that to this
piece here which is male iron pipe thread to slip
screwing those together that should create the adapter i need
to connect this end the supply end of the pvc into my hose
then on the other end i'm going to saw it off and i'm going to use a cap like
this and again probably won't even have to glue that
the only other thing i need for this project
is a drill i'm going to start off with a fairly small drill bit
this is an eighth of an inch drill bit and then
i'll move up from there if i need to
okay back in the rows field now and you can see that i've laid down the pipe
and it took me all of about oh two minutes to slip these together
all the way in up and down the row you can see of course that it
slumps a little bit it's a very forgiving material so it really doesn't
matter how it's applied and now let's look at how to do the ends
on it
and here on the supply end of course it's just as easy as sticking on that
fitting i showed you earlier that's the pvc part connected to the metal part
making sure that's nice and snug and then
just screwing it on to the output end of a hose for the male end of a hose
on the far end of the line the end where the water is supposed to stop
this end cap this cap will not fit onto the flared end of this pipe so i'm
just going to cheat here and use the tool that i have in my hand
which is my pruners to cut off this pipe here
and then cap it with the piece that i have
now i'm going to give that water some place to go so
along the length here wherever i have a rose
i'm going to go ahead and stick in
one hole for now and then i will adjust as i see what the flow through is like
just a little bit of pressure added to the system and i'm getting exactly what
i want here this is just a little bit of a flow rate
at each rose i'll measure that in just a minute
but the pressure is on so low that there is zero leakage along
the pipe here nothing dripping at any of the unions i can look at the
end where the end cap is and again no leakage and let's have a
quick look at the other end
and here at the supply end as well no leak at all
so it's holding together quite nicely let's check that flow rate
here on the far end of the system i'm just going to take a measurement to see
how long it takes to fill one liter or a quarter of a gallon
of water and then i'll compare that to what it does
nearer to the hose end or the supply end
and one more time here right next to where this the hose hooks up
with the water flow relatively the same on the output and
as it is on the front end now i'll say one last thing about this
before i move inside and show you some other parts
is that this is portable it's very light very easy to move
and because the rest of our rose field is built on exactly the same template
then there is no problem moving the irrigation from one end down to the
other and just irrigating this row by row by
row just a quick straight up comparison
between the traditional drip irrigation systems that use
drip emitters like these on line like this
and the pvc do-it-yourself system that i talked about there so
one thing that these are really good for is you can control the flow rate
with this the one that i built out there the flow rate is really just controlled
by changing the knob and that's not very precise you know for
rough irrigation like i'm trying to do i got it down to a rate where it was
putting out about a liter every minute or so which is a high rate
but suitable for my needs so i know how long i
have to put down on those rows i'm probably going to run it for
under 10 minutes per row and put in something like
three gallons or two and a half gallons of water per rose
with these ones here you get a little bit of control right out of the box
this one here is a two gallon per hour drip rate so that's the advantage of
going with the professional systems is that they they have that that drip
rate built right in and you don't have to
calculate it yourself or do hand controlling to get what you want
on the downside of these they are a little bit prone
to clogging up so even just a little bit of sediment
just a little bit of algae gets into this thing and now you've got one drip
head that is clogged and you might not know
that for a while so one of your plants may be at risk from the fact that it's
clogged and it's not and your plant is not getting water
so for those reasons plus the fact that i like the pv system
pvc system is fast it's made from locally available parts it's
easy it's cheap it's adaptable and it's portable all of those reasons
i really like the pvc system especially when trying to throw something together
really quick like this and i'm not wanting to go to a specialty irrigation
supplier alright i hope you enjoyed this video on
that do-it-yourself irrigation system if you have any
questions about that please drop them below the video
see if i can help you out