Garden Drip Irrigation System

There are a lot of homes that have automatic lawn sprinkler systems for the grass but nothing for the garden plants.   This makes it necessary for the home owners to pull a garden hose around in order to water their plants on a regular basis.   Well here is a great way to solve the problem, the Dip system.

Drip Irrigation parts

There are several advantages of a garden Drip system.   However it does need to be flexible and easy to control.   Drip can also be referred to as micro- or xerigation.   Drip is a method used to efficiently water plants, trees and shrubs by delivering a small amount of water directly to each individual plant so that 100% of the water can be used by the root systems.

Drip Irrigation source point

Drip systems can be connected up to your outdoor faucet with a watering hose timer or to an automatic underground water sprinkler system.   Here we are going to provide an example using the automatic underground sprinkler system.

Drip Benefits

Reduced water consumption – drip by design offers water efficiency by delivering only the water that is needed by each plant and to the area where the water is most effective.   When installed properly, there is less water evaporation and run off.   With the correct equipment, the amount of water to each individual or groups of plants can be controlled.   The drip bubbler or emitter can be placed close to the plant’s root system for improved delivery.   The water is delivered slowly so the soil soaks up the water and causes no run-off.

Better plant growth – when you can control the schedule and amount of water to a plant, the plants will perform better.   There will be better growth and foliage due to less stress from over or under watering.

Reduce costs – you will save money by using less water and by replacing fewer plants that end up dieing from neglect.

Fewer weeds – since your water delivery is only to your plants and not to non-planted areas, there will be fewer weeds to contend with.

Convenience – going on vacation is not a problem since your plants will be have the same watering while you are gone.  Also you don’t waste time during your busy day hand watering plants.  With healthy plants, there is less time spent fighting disease and pulling weeds.

Flexibility – many of the garden areas are irregular in shape, on a side hill or a hard to get at area which make drip systems an idea solution.  The main line and feeder lines can be placed in any configuration.  You can have straight runs, “T’s”, long lines, short lines and zig zag runs.

Adding Drip Connections

Drip Installation

There are several drip brands including Rain Bird, Rain Drip, Drip , Drip Depot and Orbit.  One brand works as well as another.  You can purchase drip systems as kits or as individual pieces.

For the drip system shown with the pictures, we used an existing zone of the underground lawn sprinkler system.  On this zone are two drip systems, each with 4 adjustable bubblers and one lawn sprinkler fixed head.   As you can see, to start each of the drip runs, we tapped into the existing one inch underground line just as any existing sprinkler head.

Adding Drip Bubbler

For each of the drip lines, instead of attaching a sprinkler head to the ½ inch riser, we attached a 90 deg PVC elbow to the riser and then attached the elbow to the ½ inch PVC tubing that runs on top of the ground around the plants.  Some people would recommend you also insert a water pressure regulator in this line before any bubblers or emitters.   However, in most cases this is not needed and just an added expense.  The water drip line can handle most cities water pressures.  The ½ inch drip tubing lays flat on the landscape fabric, held with fabric staples and runs within 2 ft of each plant.

Drip Irrigation layout

Then for each plant, we inserted a single ¼ inch barb connector in the ½ inch line close to each plant.  From this barb connector we ran a ¼ inch PVC line to the plant with a bubbler placed directly over the plant’s root system.   The water flow for this specific bubbler can be adjusted from zero to a few gallons per hour.

Water Amount Control

The amount of water applied to each plant is adjustable in a couple ways.  First the lawn sprinkler system zone controller and second the bubblers.  So this makes the drip system very flexible where with a little trial and error, you can get the correct settings.

  1. Zone control
    1. Every day or just on specific days of the week
    2. One to four times per day
    3. Duration set to specific number of minutes
  2. Adjustable bubblers at each plant

It should be noted here that the single lawn sprinkler head for the grass area is in the shade all day and requires less water than most other areas of the lawn, so this was a good situation since I’ll end up watering the garden plants on fewer days than the grass.  The drip system is on the controller “B” program and the lawn is on the “A” program.   This drip system can also be used to keep your water fountain with an adequate amount of water by placing a ¼ inch line into the fountain reservoir.   This way the reservoir gets filled each time the plants get watered.

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